28mm WW2 German Sentries

Completing the last batch of Victrix Dark Age Archers had given me the plastic bug, so I dug out the box of Wargames Atlantic (WA) WW2 German Sentries that I'd bought at Salute.

There's thirty two men and eight dogs in the box.  I used the majority of two frames and an additional gorget from a third to make up a Feldgendarmerie section of nine men and two dogs with one figure modelled as Gestapo.  All the Feldgendarmerie wear the gorgets and have painted the correct waffenfarbre arm of service colour on their shoulder straps.  I used a head from the Resistance set for Herr Erwin Plick of the Gestapo,   

This is a pretty simple set with a reasonable choice of heads and arms.  It's well worth downloading the assembly guide from the 0200 Hours section of the Grey for Now Games website.  As with all plastic sets some of the arms don't work with some of bodies, so always test before gluing.  The figures are very slight, much more so than the Warlord Games Blitzkrieg Germans and also much slighter than the WA WW1 Germans.  You'd be very hard pressed to get too much variety if you wanted to use  the whole box, but they've served the purpose very well for me.  I'll move the spare frames on at some stage. 

Being on sentry duty they're lightly equipped so there's minimal kit to attach.  What there is is not that great.  I used a Warlord Games MP40 ammo pouch and a map case instead of the WA versions, as they're much better.  The K98 rifle ammo pouches are so bad I threw them away.  There are good K98 pouches in the WW1 German set so I don't know why WA didn't reuse these.  The weapons themselves have improved and are much better than the Resistance set which are too weedy.  Once again they're not as good as Warlord or any of the main metal manufacturers like Artizan.  The dog leads are so fragile that I cut them off, drilled out the hands and replaced them with some gardening wire which worked well enough.  

As you may have guessed from the above comments I'm in two minds about Wargames Atlantic.  Mainly it's good stuff at a reasonable price.  On the whole they're easy to assemble, they paint up well and look pretty good.  However, every set always leave me feeling underwhelmed and I really don't want to be.  

Is it that they rush things into production or they just don't do enough research?  Whatever it is I always think that with a bit more effort they could produce some great sets.  It probably didn't help doing these straight after some Victrix figures which are in a different league.  I also think that Warlord Games WW2 are much, much better in every way apart from price.  And perhaps that is the crux of the matter.  WA are putting out a medium quality product at a medium price and if that's what they're USP is then they're achieving.