So this review is going to be very specific to me. The first thing to say is that the models do look nice, but they are the first time I've purchased plastic figures. Compared to metal figures, they are very fiddly to put together. A lot of time is spent trying to understand the instructions, and hoping you're gluing the right arm to the right body, in a pose that's not going to cause problems. For someone used to metals where figures normally come in one piece, this is a big downside.
Plastic figures are also incredibly light. They don't have the satisfying heft to them that metal figures have. So, in this sense, they're not as satisfying as some good metal figures. But as I said, once put together, they do look quite nice, and the transfers fitted very nicely.
Second issue is the distribution of figures. There are six mounted knights. I mostly want them for Saga, where 6 is an odd number. But for Lion Rampant that's a reasonable unit size. However, there are 8 foot knights. 2 units of hearthguard for Saga, but the wrong number for something like Rampant.
The 16 foot soldiers were fine for two warrior units, and the missile troops had 12. But, I ended up with only enough crossbows for 8 figures. The extra crossbows were all mail arms, for bodies which were entirely leather. So they didn't look right. So I have 4 figures with bows which I'm not sure what to do with. I'd also prefer that the shooters had less heavy armour.
It also didn't come with a warlord/leader figure. I could use some of the extra cloaks and fancy helms to turn one of the six mounted knights into a leader, but then that leaves me with one odd figure left over. I'm probably better off getting the pack of 18 mounted knights to bring the total to 24, then buying a warlord from elsewhere.
So the figure numbers didn't quite match what I needed, but that's very game specific. For games with less restricted unit sizes, it probably doesn't matter as much. I do play Baron's War as well, so the odd figures won't go unused.
So in all, some mixed feelings. The figures are looking nice, but some pain was involved in getting there. This was an experiment to see how I coped with plastic. It hasn't put me off entirely (I will have to get some more mounted knights, and I've also ordered the Imperial Romans), but it's going to be a process of getting used to a different way of doing things.They look nice enough for me to continue the experiment, but I'll probably be back to metal for the army after this if I can find what I want in metal.
