The Great War German Infantry 1916-1918 (30)

This is a really nice set, but it is not for beginners or the faint of heart. The sculpting and molding are very good. Some pieces do get ‘really’ small and thin, so you’ll have to use clippers, and probably tweezers to apply them. You get enough parts to make 30 Soldiers, along with a plethora of weapons and arms and heads on the sprue. You get 5 of the same sprue. On each sprue is not only 6 main bodies, but more than 20 arms, and 25 heads- 6 each with steel helmet, steel helmet with gas masks, field mutze, spiked helmets, (plus one officer’s visor cap). That’s a lot of heads. The arms really get confusing at times, as while there is a wide variation. Some only work with certain others, and I found you really need to plan ahead to make sure you’re not going to end up with some poor combination. Many of the weapons come with hands molded on to them, so you have to use the specific arms without hand on them, and make sure they are properly positioned to match up. So you’ll do a lot of dry fitting just to make sure it’s going to look the way you want it. There are small bases molded right to the bodies, which I wish they weren’t. You also get all manner of things like entrenching tools, a spare helmet with insides, bino and case, pistol holsters, raiding club, and a bunch of the smallest hand grenades I’ve seen. I think I may pass adding these to my figures they are so small. Also tiny are the straps for the gas mask cans which you hang around the necks. The gas mask cans need to be put on before the arms and heads, and can be tiresome when they get in the way. Pretty cool, but again – pretty tricky for tiny hand, or older fat fingers like me.. The weapons are mainly good, but the MP18 magazine is poorly molded, which totally ruins the look. Such a shame as the magazine should have been a separate part. Some of the items seem a bit out of scale, which I assume is a choice made for model-ability. Two of the figures are left with plain belt, but you also get extra ammo pouches to turn them into riflemen. That, I must say, is very fiddly work most people will probably pass on. All in all, a really good kit if you don’t mind doing some building. You can make a lot of different figures, and end up with a TON of extra bits (remember you get 5 sprues so that’s 125 heads and 50 stick grenades total. I plan to put the spikes helmet heads on some zombies I am working on. Nothing is cooler than zombies with spiked helmets.