British Rifle Company (Plastic) (BBX28) -Review

Hello All

Battlefront kindly sent me two platoons of the new plastic British Infantry for the Nachtjager Painting challenge, so I figured I might as well review them at the same time.

Whats in the box?

Now I only got four sprues which is enough to make two platoons of infantry, but the box set comes with 6 sprues which gives you the whole company of three Rifle Platoons. The sprue itself is great with a Piat team, Light Mortar team, two Officers, a Radio Operator, 12 individually sculpted Riflemen, 2 Bren gunners and 3 NCOs... it's crammed full!

To me this was a big improvement over the US box set which has has a lot of duplicate models on each sprue and shows how Battlefront are getting better and better with each new plastic box set.

The models are very well detailed, easily the best plastic infantry yet, there are a couple of odd modelled areas and one or two odd poses (but most infantry suffer from this - plastic or metal). I would have liked a third officer model if I was being picky but I ended up using an NCO as one platoon commander and a Bagpiper for the 2IC so less of a problem for me but still I'd like to see this in future releases.

Construction and Painting

There is no construction bar cutting the models off the sprue, all the cutting points are at easy to cut or cover points (mostly at the bottom of the bases or on the shoulders). All of the men are one piece and the slot bases fit in perfectly. I did lose a few riflemen when I was cutting them off the sprues as the rifles are very thin - this is a general problem with plastics (and can be a problem with metal infantry if we are honest), but seeing as I never put 5 infantry on a base, (even when I'm "meant to") I had plenty of spare guys to replace them with.

This was only the second British Infantry I have painted and I was using darker colours than my previous attempt. I was surprised as to how dark the British uniform is & if I had known I think I would have lightened the khaki webbing up. Other than that they were nice and easy to paint, the detail is crisp and works well with a wash and there are no real problem areas to get to.

Closing Thoughts

What can I say, these are great! Easily the best plastic infantry yet, assuming the Soviets are next to get plastic infantry I will wait on getting them over buying any metal Soviet infantry. The only real negatives are the thin guns and the lack of variety with the officer models. I do need to pick up a third platoon at some point for a few larger Late War lists.

Pros

• Great detail, best plastic sculpts yet!
• Lots of variation between the possess
• £29 for three platoons of infantry

Cons

• Like all plastics can be a little brittle 
• A few oddly modelled bits.

I hope you have enjoyed this little review,

Until next time

Ben