Long teased and long awaited, the Victrix Foot Knights have arrived, and with them comes a shedload of hefty, mail-clad warriors ready to wreak havoc in the 12th and 13th centuries.
Thanks to Victrix for sending over the materials for this review
The Foot Knights were first announced back in the mists of time (possibly last year, but it’s been a long year!) and have been eagerly awaited. We’ve seen some fantastic renders that posed the question if Victrix could deliver a set that lived up to their initial images. It turns out, with now typical flair and precision, they have. Short review this time, team!
What you Get
This is a pretty packed bag, with 32 Knights and a stonking 56 heater shields. There’s a good variety of poses – eight different Knights on four repeated sprues, 5 in Mail and Surcoat and 3 in just mail. One of Knight bodies comes with two leg options, giving you a couple of additional pose combinations. On the flip side, one body is locked into the overhead swing pose, with both arms raised above his head. You’ve got 28 multi-pose, very flexible Knights in the bag as a result, with 4 knights swinging a variety of giant two handed weapons.
As you’d expect at this point with a Victrix set there are a ton of additional weapon options, and most arms fit with 7 out of 8 bodies. I, of course, ripped into my sprues before counting everything out, but you get multiple swords, axes, spears/banner arms, maces, a ball and chain flail, two-handed weapons (including a lovely Bardiche and a deeply threatening Falchion). There’s an equally wide variety of heads – Norman style conical helmets, flat-topped helms, closed helms/greathelms, a phyrigian helm, and even kettle helms for later periods. Topping all that off, there’s a couple of other bits to add more variety, with hands holding severed heads, crosses and off-hand held swords. It all works really, really well, letting you build all 32 Knights with unique weapon and shield arm combinations, as well as 4 two-handed weapon Knights per sprue.
Building all these is straightforward – helped by Victrix’ new, much more detailed instructions – with simple head and arm joints that give you a lot of options without being everyone-looks-forward-and-has-arms-out poses. The joints are the same as the Mounted Knight set, making both sets compatible with any kitbashes you can imagine. They’re a delight to build, and cleanup is easy and straightforward, with the usual caveat that cleaning mail requires a light touch.
All those options give you a wide temporal range for your models. Modelling Norman helms and arming swords gives you First Crusade Knights, while the Bardiche, Kettle Helms and Gorgets make Knights towards the end of the mail armour period in the 14th century.
Sculpts
Detail on this kit is fantastic, from weapons to faces, cloth and leather. The great test of Medieval plastics though is mail, and this being a footslogging mail-clad set there’s absolutely nowhere to hide. Occasionally I can’t work out how Victrix manages this stuff. The 12mm range is ludicrous wizardry, but the mail here might top it. Often, mail smears or loses detail, especially around arms and legs, where undercuts pose serious difficulties and lead to flat lines of smushed up mail texture. I didn’t notice a single place this had happened on my first build and – knowing that someone would pull me up on this if I didn’t check again – looking through the sprues now I can find precisely 2 very small smears – one inside leg and one outside arm. That’s absolutely crazy! Another mail kit I have – much older (pre pandemic) has a smear on every arm.
Part of Victrix’ marketing for this set has been to say that “We have really pushed the boundaries of the tooling department with all the details in this set. We dare not tell you how many fine cutting tools they went through on all this mail!”. I thought this was a bit of hyperbole initially, but I don’t think it is – this is top-of-the-line plastic mail sculpting and I’d not be surprised at all if the cutting tools were flying all over the place when these went into tooling.
Scale
The Foot Knights look fantastically hulking, with real width and height. En masse they are a solid chunk of mail. They’re on the larger end of Medieval releases in metal and plastic, standing dead on 28mm to the eye. If you’re all in on Victrix kits, you’ll be unsurprised to know they’re all in scale with each other:
L-R Victrix Foot Knight, Mounted Knight, Foot Knight, Islamic Infantry, Norman Infantry
Comparing with the other major plastic Medieval range out there at the moment – Wargames Atlantic – the WA Knights are significantly smaller, though the Peasants and Mounted Knights scale well. Set apart in their own unit, they’ll look fine, but mixing between units will be noticeable:
L-R Victrix Foot Knight, WA Foot Knight, WA Peasant, V Foot Knight
Other ranges scale well with the Victrix foot knights, especially where larger plastics and metals are at play. First Corps metals, Footsore metals and Fireforge Plastics look good next to the Knights, with the Footsore metals being smaller but their additional dynamism compared to the WA Plastics makes the difference less obvious:
L-R Victrix, First Corps, Footsore, Victrix, Fireforge Peasant, Fireforge Byzantine
There is a bit of an elephant in the room with this kit, as Wargames Atlantic Foot Knights kit is not that old –Â I reviewed them last year – giving us multiple high quality multi part plastic sets for Foot Knights. They’re very similar in terms of pounds-per-model, weapon availability and equipment. The Victrix kit has a wider range of poses and weapon options, and overall higher detail, especially for heroes and hearthguard where the extra movement and potential for highly detailed painting will befit your most elite warriors. There are advantages to both sets but as someone who wants to do the freehand and cloth detail and doesn’t mind a more complicated paint, going forward I’ll be using this kit.
Medieval and Fantasy Heads and Shields
Victrix also sent along the Medieval and Fantasy Heads set, which we’ve talked about before but not reviewed (my fault, there). It’s a packed sprue (two in the bag) of a wide variety of fantasy-inspired helms. Swan Knights will make an excellent choice for book-inspired Lord of the Rings models, while the Teutonic and Fantasy helms make for good Bretonnians or – if you want to stay historical – jousting helms for tournament bound knights.
All of the heads work on 6/8 bodies on the foot knight sprue. The Cloaks – absolutely intended for the Mounted Knights – work really well for a kind of Hollywood dynamism on the foot knights. I’ve stuck them on to give that whole “cloak billowing in the wind” look, as if they’ve walked out of a shampoo commercial or raging storm.
Transfers
A new release means new Little Big Men Studios transfers, and these are as good as ever. I used the Rebel Baron’s war set to add a lot of colour to my Knights and build up their background as exiled Barons.
There’s a huge range here for each of the heater shield shapes, so you can guarantee there’ll be transfers for your shields however you want to build your knights.
Painting My Knights
I like the look of these Knights as brutal, mid-combat monsters, so I ended up mixing up the Medieval and Fantasy heads and cloaks and the transfers, with the Foot Knights kit. I think they look fantastic, with a real sense of threat and purpose. They look like they’re moving with purpose, a hard mail-clad fist of warriors determined to dish out unreasoning violence. I took inspiration from Ne Cede Malis, making a bunch of Rebel Knights who’ve lost the Barons’ War and undertaken the holiday-cum-murderfest that were the package holidays offered by the Teutonic Order. They’ve paid their money, travelled to the Baltic, done some murders, picked up tacky tourist hats and then off to crusade in the Levant.
They make for a perfect Western Knights unit for Saga, or the core of a Barons’ War force, making a colourful and intimidating complementary presence in my Knights of St Lazarus army.
Bair’s Knights
Lenoon threw me two sprues of these to get together and I managed to paint a whole point of warriors (that’s eight models) for my Knights Hospitaller force, played as Milites Christi in Age of Crusades. I can’t add much to what Lenoon has already said but it’s an excellent kit. My only complaint is that one-in-eight models has to be built with a big two-handed weapon lofted overhead but at least you get a choice of two different swords (there’s probably a special name for at least one of those) and a massive axe. Also the odd lack of sword scabbards without a hilt attached felt strange and that’s coming from someone that’s only played Historicals for a bit over a year; can’t believe I’ve gotten this level of pedantry already. Obviously you can just cut the hilts off. Or simply leave them off most models like I did. Oops.
The below is not just one sprue, I used mostly surcoat-clad models from the two sprues I was given to make up these and the other eight were built to be used as my very generic Age of Chivalry warband that is yellow/green; I’d much rather paint surcoats black! This paint scheme is dead simple too. I sprayed them silver because painting silver is the worst part of any model. All paints after that are Pro Acryl: the surcoats Coal Black and drybrushed Dark Neutral Grey, wood is Drab Brown, off-white cloth bits Dark Ivory, skin Tan Flesh, leathers Warm Brown, golds Rich Gold all followed by an overall Black Wash. Easy. Shields are all transfers from Victrix with some MIG Ultra Matte painted over them. Took about 3ish hours from start to finish including watching paint dry, got to love it. I’m tempted to get a whole bag for myself and just do a whole big force outside of Saga, now, too.
These knights just carry so much implied weight in their posing that I just love. They look burdened while carrying some of the casual strength that you’d want to see.
Overall
This is another fantastic kit, rounding out a straight streak of awesome kits in the Medieval range from Victrix. With Foot Sergeants round the corner, we’ve never been spoilt for options like this. Whether you’re going for a Saga army (Crusades or Chivalry, thanks Bardiche and Kettle helms!), Barons’ War or anything else, this is a kit that’s determined to make an impact on medieval gaming.
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