This is just a niggle, but does anyone else not like the name of the weapons: Heat Hammer and Heat Cannon?
It should sound a bit more threatening or imposing. I doubt Mantic will change the name now, but my ideas for such heat named weapons are:

Scorch Hammer / Scorch Cannon – not so good, but first thought-
Thermal Hammer / Thermal Cannon
Molten Hammer / Molten Cannon-not sure about Molten Cannon
Incinerator Hammer / Incinerator Cannon
Forge Hammer (makes sense, they’re Forge Fathers, they forge weapons, they hit you with a Forge Hammer 😉 although Forge Cannon, doesn’t make sense, bugger. Maybe Furnace Cannon… Looks almost like Furniture Cannon, bugger.

Cremator Cannon! C’mon, who doesn’t wanna fire the Cremator Cannon?! 😛

Out of my own rambled thoughts, I like Forge Hammer and Cremator Cannon. 😀

About the box design –
It’s a shame the box art painting is cropped into a strip. If I’d painted that, I’d be miffed that nearly all my artwork has been covered up! It does give it a bit of a cinematic widescreen look to it though.
Seeing more of the box art would help me to choose a different paint scheme, especially for the Forge Fathers; as opposed to painting them ultramarine blue. 😉 Right now all we can see is the top half of the forge father, a bit of a forge father gun, an Orx with his feet covered up 😛 and a few Orx heads. While I’m not expecting to see it done in the same style as a GW box, at least with the full artwork in view you get a better sense of the universe this game is played in. Right now, I don’t know what that looks like. From the box art, it’s a mountain range.
Maybe the blue bands are covering up planets in the sky or something that made it look other-worldly. There’s no sense of it being the Orx homeland or the forge fathers; no buildings or ruins (as far as I can see anyway). They’re just fighting. In a mountain range. Somewhere… In spaaaace!?

The back of the box kind of looks like a photo of some new models on someone’s gaming table. What would’ve been more exciting and enticing is if Mantic created a special table with terrain that’s from Warpath’s universe (or something to match the box art, mountains perhaps…). Terrain specific to Warpath would give you a better reason to choose this game over something else, because everyone’s seen a green battlefield before, and now people are either creating realistic battlefields with craters or buying sections of battlefields with them modelled on and painting/flocking them colours other than green. It is a nice big picture of the minis, but they could have also shown the other contents of the box, including rule book, if not the “five additional forge fathers”, just to see what you’re getting for your money. It’s also hard to tell one squad from each race apart from another with them all lumped together in one photo, especially if it’s the first time you’ve seen the box (and until you read the description on the right).

The problem they must have obviously faced is how to present a new sci-fi wargame and not make it look like 40K. And that must have been one hell of a bastard job to do lol! So I guess that’s why there are these compromises. I dunno, I’m not a box designer, they’re just my thoughts. Maybe advertising on the back or the front saying With Rules Written By Alessio Cavatore! would also show that this is decent game with fun rules and that you should buy it and play it, now!

I think my comments stem from wanting to get a definite vibe about the game that’s identifiable as being Warpath. Like for instance; Infinity has a definite look about it that you could point to picture of their models or artwork and say ‘That’s from the game Infinity’. You get a sense of the hi-tech future of the game from the special terrain inn the background of their photos. I think this is something that may not have been chosen to be done, so that people could still use the minis as proxies in none other than 40k, just like people are do so with Kings of War.
Perhaps when the other races are released it will address this problem, and we’ll see more artwork from the Warpath universe and get a sense of time and place. GW make it pretty clear with their games, with such tag lines as In The Grim Darkness of the 41st Millennium There is Only War. That tells you loads about the game, most excitingly of which, especially if you’ve never heard it before and you’re 11 or 12, that this is in the 41st millenium, waaaaay off into the future, and you would nature start to wonder what this universe is like, why is the future grim, why is there only war?
Warpath needs something like that to get you hooked into it and keep the imagination going for over 20 years or so (as in my case :P). Right now the big selling point is that you get more minis for your bucks than from the 40K box and the rules are quicker to learn. I’d like to know more about why I should play the game itself and what stories with the battles I’d play I could tell.
Does anyone know if there’s going to be more background to read in the box than on the website, particularly with regards to the other races?
Right, my rambles over, again lol.

Maybe I’ve said a load of inconsequential clap-trap, but by great Odin’s raven, please change the name of the Heat Hammer and Cannon to something more fearsome! Something that will blow things up! The alliteration of H-eat H-ammer is annoying to say out loud (to my ears anyway lol) and it sounds like a weapon made from a hair dryer, or something to fix bent resin minis: “I’ll just apply some heat here, and… we’re done, there, I fixed the bent sword with the heat hammer”: D