Comet Platoon (BBX30) - Review

Hello All,

As you will know from the Tale of Four Gamers painting challenge I have been collecting up a British Infantry company. Well that is coming to a close and I'm now looking at how to expand my British collection. I was looking at what to get next and along came a couple of boxes of Comets at Entoyment and like a kid in a toy shop (I guess you could say literally a kid in a toy shop) I had to buy them.

Whats in the box?

In the box you get enough bits to make 5 Comet tanks, the tank itself comes on a single sprue, with the only extra sprue being the same commander sprue you find in the Sherman box set. The decal sheet is 11th armored based as you would expect as they were the only British unit to be equipped with Comets during the war.

All in all the box didn't feel crammed full as some of the other box set (the Sherman and the T-34 come to mind) but I guess with less options on the sprue (this is only doing one variant after all where as the other sets are normally doing multiple) that's not surprising.

Construction

This was a bit of a mixed bag, the tank has 16 pieces which isn't too many for a plastic kit. Most of the pieces are fine and are very well detailed. The hull went together without any problems, as did the main part of the turret, as with most of the Battlefront kits I used their very useful construction guide on the website.

The problems came with the MG's and the searchlight, the guide did warn me about the MG's in fact you get 3 MG's per box set as they knew it would be a problem. Even having said all that I still have a lot of trouble cutting them off the sprue and ended up with 8 out 15 unbroken. The searchlight was less of an issue but I did cut the wrong place when I was removing one from the sprue, My only advice is to take a little extra care when removing them. Other than the little problems with the MG's and searchlights the building time was pretty quick and I had the 5 tanks built in about two hours. 

Painting wise I did them the same way I did the Shermans for the painting challenge, I did change a few decals with decals from the Late War British Armoured pack, I did this for two reasons, one being this set has been very popular and so I wanted my tanks to look a little different from the everyone else. The other more important reason was my decal softner had run out and the large allied star that I want to use on the back of the tank was too big and the raised detail meant it didn't sit right. This was solved by using slightly small stars from the British Sherman set.

Closing thoughts

Overall I like the set, it doesn't quite have the value of some of the other (thinking U.S. Shermans, T-34's, etc) but then you will probably only ever need 10 Comets anyway (unless they Battlefront does the Korean War soon). The model very nicely detailed and goes together well bar the couple of problems areas (and they are all when you remove the pieces from the sprue), the decals are great if you have the right tools for the Allied stars, this is a solid kit that just fails to reach the heights of some of the more resent releases.

Pros

• Easy to put together.
• The detail is outstanding.
• Good value box set.

Cons

• Some pieces are very hard to put together
• You will need decal softner to use the decals in the box

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed the review. I have another 5 Comets to paint up and then I'm sure you will see them in a few  AAR's very soon.

Ben