Victrix Spartans Arrive

The plastic miniatures I've been awaiting for several months now were finally released a few weeks back an I  managed to get my hands on a pack shortly afterwards.  Victrix have previously dealt exclusively with the Napoleonics Wars but practically from their first inception they suggested they would produce Ancient Greek Hoplites next.  Now the Athenian and Spartan sets are out, with Theban and Mercenary sets to follow; naturally I wanted to get hold of the Spartans.

What you get is the typical large Victrix box with enough parts for 48 figures:

Early Victrix figure sets, such as their British Infantry, were if anything, riticised for containing too many fiddly pieces, and resultantly requiring excessive cleaning and assembly.  Although the sprues here may still look busy, the same charge cannot be levelled at the Spartans:

In fact the reverse criticism could be made, that there is too limited a pose range.  There are only four torsos on the sprue, repeated twice and thankfully all standing at least; and the arms are largely either holding spear at rest, or thrusting.  Of course this does suit the appearance of these ancient Greek warriors, but a modeller or converter may be disappointed by the lack of variety in the set, something the gamer will be conversely glad is absent.

To see how they assembled, I put together a unit of 16, with Hail Caesar in mind.

My front rank are with thrusting spears and a commander and musician, the rear rank at rest.  As suggested the variety is limited.  But the finished quality of the figures is top notch, my only criticism at this stage being that the heads, as with previous Victrix sets are caricatured and somewhat oversized.  That aside, the posing and fit of the models is preferable, and the general level of sculpting better than the Immortal/Warlord Games Greeks.

Value wise they come out marginally better; based on RRP's Warlord work out as 50p per figure, whilst the Victrix are just under 48p each.  Each passes the price test, but the Victrix are slightly superior models in my opinion.

Overall a great addition to the widening range of plastic Ancients, now if one of these companies would do plast Greek cavalry or Thracians, I'd be a happy chap indeed!