I don’t have a great history with WizKids and it's mostly because I don't like their sculpts. Some of their monsters are pretty good, I've posted some dragons and beholders they produced here in this thread, but their rank & file PC miniatures and a lot of their NPCs and monsters are simply not fun to paint. There was a retailer at Gamehole Con selling a lot of products for half price and I picked up this WizKids Frameworks Beholder for $20. If you're unfamiliar with their Framworks line, these models come on plastic sprues, so you need to cut them out and assemble them like you would a Games Workshop model. This allows you to customize your model a little more easily than you can their standard models. In theory anyway.
At first glance, it looks okay. I hadn't finished assembling it when I took this photo, so the upper teeth and eyestalks are missing, but you get a good idea of what it looks like. The sculpt is fine. The detail is good and while I wish the eye was larger that's an aesthetic preference and not really a technical problem. There are some pretty big gaps I'm going to have to fill before I paint this model. Some gaps are just a fact of life when it comes to assembling models, but this thing retails for about $40, and the gaps are large enough that I find it unacceptable for the price.
It's (technically) true that their framework Beholder is more customizable than the other Beholders they produce. This one comes with your choice of two eyes, two tongues, two lower jaws, and two upper jaws. It just doesn't matter much because the differences are so minor they may as well not exist. The long and short of it is this miniature is overpriced, it's not fun to assemble, and you'd be better off purchasing their regular Beholder for less than $10. This is the second Framework model I've bought and the second time I've been disappointed.
