EM4 Miniatures - Troopers - Heavy Weapons
| Name of Product | Troopers - Heavy Weapons |
| Product Number | SFP5 |
| Manufacturer | EM4 Miniatures |
| Genre | Science Fiction / Near Future |
| Scale | 28mm |
| Price | £3.95 (including plastic sprues for 5 miniatures) |
What do you get?
As extra support for their plastic troopers EM4 Miniatures also sell a conversion kit to allow you to create heavy weapons / support troopers. The conversion kit can either be purchased along with the plastic spues or on its own. For the kit you get 5 metal torso's to replace the normal plastic ones and 5 different heavy weapons. Missile Launcher, Flamethrower, Machine Gun, Mini-Gun and a Recoiless Rifle. The latter looking more like an anti-tank rifle. The weapons support the artwork found in the Combat Zone sci-fi skirmish game, I didn't instantly recognise what some of them were supposed to be. The picture only shows four of the weapons, the fifth being already attached to a trooper torso in a picture below. All of the torso's and weapons came having already been given a white undercoat.
The 5 metal torso's are designed to replace the plastic ones from the original troopers. The torso's and weapons are quite detailed with the torso's having visorless helmets and sporting some characterful facial expressions. The style on the torso's is different from the plastic troopers. The look of the helmets and flak jackets is more modern day compared to Near Future / Sci-Fi.
The parts from the heavy weapons conversion kit fit onto the plastic parts without too much effort. You may need to do a bit of bending to align the metal parts. The picture shows a combination of using the metal torso and heavy weapon (as with the mini-gunner) alongside just using the weapons on the standard plastic bodies.
Using both the torso and weapon the miniatures struck me as being ever so slightly smaller than the plastic versions. But not so you couldn't mix them together.
The final word.
As with the Command version of the conversion kits offered by EM4 I ddin't see the need to have already undercoated parts. Unless they were fully cleaned and ready to be used. As already mentioned the weapon style is quite different to the normal plastic kit weapons but work ok alongside. The only thing that did throw me with these metal weapons was that once stuck to plastic miniatures you shift the weight of the miniature quite dramatically. I just so happened to use the leaning body for the mini-gun and missile launcher weapons which had the effect of making them topple over with the slightest of touches. I will definitely have to look at weighting the bases.
When I bought the heavy weapons conversion kit I also bought the Command conversion kit. I decided to use the metal torso's for the command miniatures. The picture above shows a combination of the metal arms you get with the command kit with the metal torso's. You can see the review for the Command Conversion Kit here
