Sunday, April 25, 2010

Wargames Factory Shock Troopers

A few days ago I received a test sprue of the new miniatures from Wargames Factory - Shock Troopers. At first sight, the components of the sprue look quite interesting, enough to assemble three soldiers with many different options. The best thing about this sprue is that you can use it for many different rules sets, from the well-known Warhammer 40K to weird World War. They can be used for regular soldiers or irregular militian soldiers, aliens, etc.

The mould line is hardly visible so they do not need to be treated very much, at least on the sprue I have received. When assembling them, I find the same problem as with other Wargames Factory miniatures - the head-neck joint makes the neck look unnatural, it looks too long. But this can be solved with a little cut at the base of the neck. Other than that, I see no problems, the pieces fit in very well and you can achieve diffferent and dynamic poses. They could even be improved by including parts from other Wargames Factory miniatures and other makes.

I enjoyed painting these miniatures because they have sharp details and the areas are well defined. I think Wargames Factory is constantly improving its work. I have assembled three miniatures as regular soldiers and painted them in three different schemes. For each of them I have chosen a different type of weapon from the sprue: laser rifle, grenade launcher and laser gun, or something (I'm not too sure what the last one is!). I have used brown and cream for the first miniature to represent a type of trooper used to fight in rocky lands and dark forests. Blue, grey and white for the second miniature, which could be for snow troops or urban fighting. The colours on the last one are a mixture of WWI and II German soldiers, which can be for a WWII game.When I get more of these I will try more colours and I will probably end up making a large Warhammer 40K Imperial Guard army, like many of us who have been waiting for these miniatures; or a Secret of the 3rd Reich army.

Thanks to Tony and the team at Wargames Factory for sending me the test sprue and for being able to be one of the first ones to try them.