Valiant miniatures - Fighting 20s. Kit Review. German Infantry and German heavy weapons.

Years ago, Wargames illustrated gave away a free sprue of Valiant miniatures American G.Is from their 1:72 range. Despite the fiddly options for heads, arms and weapons I was always very impressed with the sculpts and dynamic and lifelife poses they supplied. Always having an intention to get some of their German infantry in a full set, I never quite got round to it, primarily because Valiant's 1:72 guys are fairly chunky, and look a little oversized next to other 1:72 plastics figures.

Valiant have since started a scaled down range of the same figures, named the "Fighting 20's" which are a slightly smaller version of their original figures. This is in itself excellent, a company listening to the comments of wargamers and modellers alike, and acitvely adjusting their product!

I got hold of two sets recently, the "German Infantry 42-44" and the matching "German 81mm Mortar and Tripod MG42" sets.

As you can see the packaging is compact, with nice artwork and well laid info on the kit. Each kit comes with an HQ sprue of 3 figures, then 2 identical sprues each.

For the Infantry set this equates to 21 figures total
For the heavy weapons set it equates to 13 figures, and two tripod MG's and two 81mm Mortars.

The Sprues up close...

 

German infantry sprues assembled

  

Heavy weapons sprues assembled

All together

The infantry set comes with four figures with all arms and weapons already attached. From left to right they come in a total quantity of four, three, two and one.

 Following this we have the figures with arm options, including MP40's, STG44's (oddly, considering the kit ranges from 42-44) panzerfaust, and a vaguely generic rifle that looks as if it could be either a Kar98k or a Gewehr 43, depending on which detail you look at. You also have the options for a rather oddly posed MG42 gunner. Although I do like the Panzerschreck carrier.

As well as these we have kneeling figures that I armed thusly, it was also with these guys that I made use of the kits options for headswaps.
Oddly it gives you varied heads with different headgear, i.e forage caps, and helmets with camo covers, but no headless figures, so you literally have to hack off the head of an existing figure, and hope it doesn't go wrong hah.

You can see one problem of attaching a replacement head on the far right, as the plastic itself is fairly soft, the accidental overapplication of poly cement (to get the head to f%$ing stay there ;) ) has melted the collar and chest details, but looks good to my eyes and some brush work will cover that up.

Another thing I found mildly irritating and inexplicable was that the kneeling figures like this, had their left legs separate...it gives no other leg options and merely makes it awkward to complete them, I imagine there must have been some casting reason for this, but it escapes me....as you can see, one of the legs on the left has...gone wandering. Something I only noticed upon uploading this picture, it has since been rectified.

Finally we have the HQ figures, a nice combo of an officer in cap and a senior NCO in helment with nice poses, although the kneeling figure is not ideal, I assume he is a radio operator, but it is not made overly obvious and there is a hole in his front from the mould.

The hole in the central figure is just visible over his stomach.

 Next we have the heavy weapons kit. The mortars are nice pieces and went together fairly easily, with arm options for the crew so they do not come across TOO generic. The MG's on the other hand were highly frustrating, despite being very nicely moulded figures. The tripod struts are very fragile, one of the back legs snapped on one removing it from the sprue, then even though I took even more care because of this, the second ones front tripod leg snapped on removal...there was much swearing and fiddling with glue to rectify the mistakes, but in the end they look great.

Now we come to the "bits", the leftovers, we have a selection of heads, arms and weapons remaining for future use and conversion, which is always nice...

As usual a nice black primer spray and a light dusting of base colour bring them together quite nicely.

Finally, a quick size comparison with other brands...

In the brown we have some of the original, slightly larger Valiant 1:72 G.Is, the sandy coloured are the German figures in question. You can see they are mounted on pennies, so next to the older figs they are the same height, but there is a discernable size difference, as if the Americans are better fed, but they would work well together in mixed units I think. On the right are two classic 1:72 Revell figures, showing that the Valiant figures still seem to work well scaling wise.

CONCLUSIONS?

On first impressions the figures are very nicely sculpted and are well scaled with a good range of options for arming. They are well moulded and bits fit together smoothly and without issue for the most part.
The heavy weapons can be fiddly to put together, and you must be gentle removing them from the sprue, but they go together nicely.
Appearance wise, I find the poses a little wooden in some of the figures, especially the walking MG soldier, it seems an odd way to be modelled with an MG. I can also see problems with having multiples kits and the poses becoming repetitive quite quickly without conversion work, but overall there is sufficient diversity.
Overall I am quite happy with them, and they scale well with my 1:72 armour as well as my other figures in the scale from Revell and Pegasus. We shall see how well they paint up, hopefully quite soon :)