Stop the Madness – Heroically over-sized Miniatures.
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It is sad (and a little funny) that the newer Warlord Games plastic figure sets for their Bolt Action series are the “butt” of jokes.
I have some Perry Miniatures 28mm WW2 figures, and they are some of my favorite 28mm figures for Bolt Action, but they only have North Africa German and British (in plastic) and some really nice American infantry (in plastic). However, it looks like Rubicon Models has American, British, German, and Soviet infantry.
Does anyone here have both the Rubicon Models 28mm WW2 figures and the Perry Miniatures plastic 28mm WW2 figures? How do they compare to each other?
It looks like that they should mix and blend in very well with one another.
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I was just on Skype with one of my friends, and he told me that Wargames Factory use to produced plastic 28mm WW2 figures. I know about Wargames Factory, but I didn’t now they produced WW2 figures. More importantly, they use to have WW2 Soviet infantry! And they look good – see picture of sprue below.
Because Wargames Factory figures are not overly beefy (heroically over-sized miniatures) they should blend in very well with the Perry Miniatures. Sadly, these figures are not easy to get now. I wonder if they will get produced again? Does anyone have these figures? And if so, what do you think of them?
I don’t have any Warlord to compare to at the moment, but Steve, of Age of Glory Historical Miniatures, the U.S. distributor of Empress Miniatures, was kind enough to send me a couple of sample figures to compare with my Rubicon figures.
They are very nice, clean figures, but as you can see from the photo (Empress on the left, Rubicon on the right), the Empress figs are a bit larger in proportions when compared to the Rubicon, but they are still far less “heroic” then Warlord figures.
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First, the background story:
Sometime ago I picked up the Warlord Games 8.8cm FLAK 37 plastic kit because frankly I didn’t want the metal kit. Later, I picked up two more plastic 88 kits; one by Italeri, and the other by Rubicon Models. Now, the Italeri kit is the same plastic kit model as the Warlord kit except for the box, decals, and the seven (Luftwaffe) crew figures, which are plastic. Now the Rubicon Models kit is a completely different plastic kit altogether, and before anyone asks, I do not have a preference as to which one is better. All of them will make for an excellent model for the gaming table. However, the Rubicon Models kit comes with transport wheels.
Also, before someone asks, “Why did you buy three 88’s?”, well, actually it was a total of four, but the short answer is that I missed my game-aholic anonymous meeting.
Now, about the 28mm figures:
Until yesterday, all my 88 kits just sat in a box on my shelf. Why? Well, for multiple reasons really. Regardless, yesterday I opened up the Warlord kit. You know, the one with the metal crew figures. I was expecting to see some embarrassing heroically over-sized chunks of metal, but I was surprised. These metal crew figures blend in better with my older plastic Bolt Action 28mm figs, as well as my 28mm Perry figs. Not only that, but these metal crew figures are true 28mm (bottom of foot to top of head – not factoring base or helmet).
If you are the sculpture of these figures, and you are reading this, than I would like to say, “thank you” for not being corrupted by the scale-creep* and the silly heroically over-sized trend. In fact, these metal crew figures put some of the newer Bolt Action plastic sets to shame. Maybe these crew figs are old sculpts? Regardless, I can use these figures instead of scratch-building some plastic figs.
*but isn’t 28mm figs related to the scale-creep of 25mm figs?
This is a continuation of the 88 post just above.
As mentioned earlier, the Italeri 88 model is exactly the same. The only difference are the box and box art, assembly instructions, decals, and the crew figures. The crew figures are plastic and do not have that heroically oversized look. They will mix in with my WW2 Perry Miniatures plastics. Another thing I like about the Italeri plastic crew is that you get multiple arm choices for some of the crew figures. However, the crew are Luftwaffe (look like Fallschirmjäger). Maybe it would have been better to have something more standard, but then again there might be an agreement between Warlord Games and Italeri Models.
I have a couple of boxes of Warlord Games plastic Fallschirmjäger, so I plan to paint up them someday. However, the Italeri crew figures will not mix easily with the overly heroic scaling (beefy) plastic Fallschirmjägers by Warlord games. But since they are crew figures for the 88, they will only have to “mix in” at a distance.
I finally got to the RM’s 88. As mentioned before, anyone of these plastic kits (Italeri/Warlord, Rubicon Models) would be a great addition to anyone’s collection. These are so much better than the older/resin metal kits for multiple reasons. That being said, I like how the RM kit give you the wheels and lots of extra stuff like fired shells, shells containers, and of course shells themselves.
But this is not the topic of the thread, so let’s talk figures.
The RM crew figs and the Italeri crew figs are more anatomically correct, but as mentioned before, the metal crew figs you get with the Warlord kit are actually pretty good and don’t have that silly and grossly over-heroic sizing, so these blend in pretty good with the RM and Italeri plastic figures.
That being sad, I think they would mix better if you replace the RM figure heads with some extra German infantry figure heads from your spare bits box. I have not done this yet, but it should be easy. Has anyone tried this RM plus Warlord mix?
I have also noticed that the arms from the original plastic German Infantry set – the ones with separate weapons – from Warlord do work with the RM figures, but the newer sets, well, the arms are grossly over-heroic and look funny when attached. But this is to be expected since the arms are not interchangeable even between the older and newer Warlord plastic infantry sets. Which of course is a real shame.
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The metal crew for the plastic 88 look much better than the guys that came with a buddies resin kit , new molds ? Not much of a metal fan so I got both the Italeri and RM guns . I noticed that while you get the transport wheels with the RM kit , the drop legs on the gun platform have the stakes molded in them . And the Italeri kit has the stakes molded in the transport position , while having no wheels .
I’m hoping to fit the Italeri gun onto the RM wheels for firing in transport mode diorama / scenery piece and use the RM gun in a Atlantic wall type bunker / gun position
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With all this 88 talk, and pictures like the one shown before (from WG front page), I’m really encouraged to put some paint to my 88s I have assembled.
For sure, one of the 88s I plan to paint will be in overall dunkelgelb so it can perform double duty as mid to late war Europe and North Africa (close enough). I will have two sets of crew. For the North Africa crew, I plan to convert some 28m plastics by Perry (their Afrikakorps 1941-43 set).
As mentioned earlier in this thread, Perry mixes in a good blend of anatomically correctness with some exaggerated detail and proportions that make them work and look good on the gaming table, or even for static dioramas. Are the Perry Miniatures perfect? No, but IMHO they do a better job at this fine art of making 28mm wargaming figures than most other companies. And yes, I still think that the new 28mm plastic US Infantry from Perry are fantastic! They are just beautiful… but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
…but now back to trying to stop the heroically over-sized miniature madness 🙂
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