EM4 Miniatures - Troopers
| Name of Product | Troopers |
| Product Number | SFP1 |
| Manufacturer | EM4 Miniatures |
| Genre | Science Fiction / Near Future |
| Scale | 28mm |
| Price | £2.50 (for 5 miniatures) |
What do you get?
EM4 miniatures' hard plastic troopers come on four sprues giving five torso's, body sections, arms with weapons and backpacks. There are three varieties of each part on the sprues. The weapon arms are carrying 2 x Assault rifle, 2 x pistol, 1 x sub machinegun and knife. The main body parts are 2x crouching, 2 x walking, 1 x standing. All the parts are interchangable and simply snap together by means of pegs and holes in the respective parts.
Considering the age of these miniatures (originally sculpted by Bob Naismith) they carry a creditable amount of detail. Features are a bit soft but defined enough so you won't have to paint on surface textures. Mould lines are typical of most plastic miniatures and can be quite pronounced in places. A bit of filing would remove them ok without risking damage to the surface detail.
The miniatures go together very easily. For this picture I simply
pressed the parts together. Obviously for gaming I would recommend
gluing them. As previously mentioned you can mix the parts up
giving a good variety to how your army/squad could look.
A close up of the backpacks and rear of the miniatures again shows the level of detail. As you can see one of the backpacks included is a radio (excuse the bent aerial I did straighten it later!).
How do they compare?
Although the original blurb for the Combat Zone said it contained 25mm scale miniatures the basic walking pose miniature stands almost 33mm tall.
Unfortunately I didn't have a good selection of other sci-fi / near future miniatures for the comparison shot (I'll sort one out for the future), but here we have a painted example of one of the plastic troopers alongside a Ground Zero Games NSL Trooper. The EM4 trooper is the slightly crouching pose so you can see they are larger than miniatures sold as being 25mm (as in the GZG case).
The final word.
EM4 miniatures' plastic troopers originally came out in 1998 (yes that's 12 years ago!) as part of the boxed set for the game Combat Zone. I recently picked some up to use in that very same game. I was trying to do a wargaming project on the cheap, so what better than 50p per miniature. On searching the web it was clear these miniatures have fallen into obscurity. Which is a shame because I think they do the job very well. They won't stop me picking up some other more expensive metal miniatures but to be able to build a force quickly and cheaply they are still comparable in price to newer plastic miniatures. Prince August do a massive bag of 80 plastic sci-fi miniatures for €19.95 (€0.24 each) or more recently Wargames Factory sci-fi troopers at $19.95 for 18 miniatures ($0.71 each). So if you need a sci-fi or near future force quickly and cheaply then you can do far worse.
