We’ve got an array of resin conversion parts on the review desk from a pretty new company by the name of Anzio Miniatures.
Aimed at anyone wanting to play the Chinese in WW2 or for use in Chinese Civil War games. These sets give you the chance to add some customised details to your preferred WW2 28mm figures and we’re guessing that Bolt Action is the primary target in the sights.
Heads
There are various head options available to suit your needs and you get eight to a pack, which will set you back €5. The heads are cast in resin and come on a frame of four, which is duplicated, so you’ll have just four variants in all.
There’s a set with Brodie helmets, three plain and one with webbing, a set with M1 helmets, again one with webbing, and a set wearing rogatywka caps. Also available (but not in the lot we got) are heads with basic caps and M35 helmets too.
While these certainly offer a good amount of variety and will set you up to build a range of Chinese forces we aren’t totally convinced by the consistency and realism of the head sculpts. There’s some awkwardness to the style, particularly the squinty eyes that feature on most of them, which is unfortunate, to say the least. The wide-eyed stares and bulging looking eyeballs on the rogatywka cap heads aren’t exactly an improvement and make them really stand out as different. At the €5 for eight price range, we feel we have to be quite critical, that’s not exactly cheap.
Weapons
Also available (at the same price for eight) are Chinese Dadaos and Czechoslovakian Zb-26 machine guns. These are interesting options, offering some more characterful finishing touches to your Chinese army. The Dadaos can be used to make some of your command models stand out while the Zb-26s will give you some new ways to lay down light machine gunfire.
You’ll need to be careful with your cleanup of the guns – they come on a frame of resin that has obviously been used to feed the material as best as possible, but it seems that it’s not quite done as good a job as it could have, as there are some air bubbles and pockmarks remaining.
While the quality here isn’t the best that we’ve seen we really hope that Anzio Miniatures push on to improve the finish on parts like these. With the amount of WW2 gamers around there’s certainly a market for products that bring more diversity to some of the lesser-played armies.