Review SBX33 Strelkovy Battalion (Plastic)

Morning all, Winner Dave here with a review of the new plastic Strelkovy Battalion.

This is my first box of plastic infantry so, I was expecting great things from what I'd read of other plastic infantry reviews.

Let's see what we get, inside the box are 6 sprues, and each sprue has 24 dudes in total or 25 bits as the HMG gunner comes in two halves.  So in total you get 144 soldiers, which is enough to make 4 platoons of 7 stands, 3 HMG bases and a command stand or 2.

I found taking the guys off the sprue easy and only broke one of them at the foot, which was easily rectified.  Clean up was super easy, which is good because clean up is my least favourite part of the hobby.  I pretty much just cleaned the helmets up and a line of flash on the commanders.

Now, I must confess I made a boo boo here.  I actually thought there were doubles of a particular pose on each sprue.  So that you got 6 soldiers looking like this and 12 looking like that.  It turns out I didn't look closely enough and each pose is unique, but some are similar...you'll see what I mean.

Here's a photo of the lot...phew that's a lot of toy soldiers...

Sorry about the table runner.  My great plan had been to paint one of each pose for the review as I knew I wouldn't get the lot painted, but well you'll see.

These are the guys I thought there were 12 of, but there's 6 of each

There's 6 of these, which look similar to the above photo...sorry

HMG is cool

Two poses of LMG

Pointers and Wavers

Advancing at various rates

Grenade dude and obligatory kneeling shooting dude

A Boss and a Commissar

So, I doubt you're going to need 6 Commissars, perhaps just 2 or 3, but maybe there's some funky objectives they could be integrated into.

Hopefully the detail speaks for itself, I love the pockets and how very clear all the straps and pouches are.  I'm usually lucky to get a handful of metal ones as clearly cast as these.  Plastic does have its drawbacks, you can often get a hard bit of plastic inbetween areas like the gun and the arm, which are impossible to remove and leave you wondering how to paint it.  On the whole this was rare, with only 2 poses really suffering from additional plastic syndrome (IIRC).

I find paint rubs off the plastic quite easily, which surprised me, I thought I suffer less of this than with metal.  I had to repaint all of the helmets as my fingers had rubbed paint off very easily, so some careful varnishing is called for.  That said, when I drop them, the plastic fair far far better than their metal counter parts.

I'll certainly miss the weight and overall feel of the metal minis...especially when you get a really good batch.  At their best I think I prefer metal figs (My Japanese and Great War Brits for example), but on average plastic wins.

Back to this particular boxset, I'm really pleased with them, the detail is sharp the poses are quite good, maybe a little static but the amount in a box seems very very good value to me.  I hope in the future there is an SMG armed battalion and some panzer faust armed guys would be most welcome...along with a couple of flame throwers.

Thanks for reading

WinnerDave