Goonhammer Historicals – Wargames Atlantic Plastic WW1 German HMGs Review

Wargames Atlantic recently put out the latest plastic kit in their Great War range – German HMGs (1914-18). This goes alongside their existing range of plastics and is the first heavy weapons set they have put out (previous sets have covered infantry only). Goonhammer has previously reviewed the French Infantry and British Infantry sets from WA, and we did a comprehensive run down of all the WW1 minis on the market, so check those out.

We’d like to thank WA for passing a copy to the Goonhammer Historicals team for review. If you want to pick up the set, you can do so here with our affiliate link.

First Impressions

The box art is what we have come to expect as the standard for the Great War range at WA, with a nice illustration and some pictures of the assembled and painted miniatures. The standard of the painting and photography of the latter has markedly improved since the first few boxes in the range, which is great to see. 

The box includes some interesting tidbits of historical information on it’s reverse – although I’m left wondering if some of the real estate on the back could better have been dedicated to an assembly or painting guide. (More on this later.)

The Sprues 

You get three sprues in the box. Each sprue can make one complete machine gun team (with three crew) and another uncrewed gun. No bases are included but as this is a historical kit, that feels fair enough as the general rule is BYOB. 

The sprue layout is good – about as dense as any other historical manufacturer offering. However, there are no parts numbers (we’ll come back to this). Flashing is minimal and the number/location of gates reasonable. The plastic is WA’s standard light grey polystyrene. 

The variety of headgear on the sprues is excellent, covering basically everything you could need for any period of the war. It even includes Jaeger shakos. 

However, there are some issues:

• Personal gear is very light/partial. The crew have their haversacks and the option for canteens; however, there are no carbines or rifles, sidearms, entrenching tools, bayonet scabbards, or gas mask cases. Two of the crew do have the carrying harness for the machine gun though, so that’s good to see. 
• Although the box indicates the kit covers the whole war, it’s only really suitable for mid to late war. The M15 tunic isn’t right for those wanting to cover 1914. 
• An option for assault packs would be welcome for late war. 

Assembly

The main choice is whether to go for a low or high setting for the sled for the machine gun. This choice dictates the choice of gunner model (the sitting or kneeling figure respectively). Building the machine gun is fairly straightforward. I like that they have bulked up the gun/flash suppressor to make it more resilient to pudgy fingers. The frame looks a bit fragile but was completely fine in practice. I did manage to break the first hose (for the water filled gun jacket) when trying to clean off a gate. Luckily there are two per sprue, so that worked out fine. 

The kit comes with a huge plethora of arm options, which is welcome and makes for potentially lots of variety in crews. However; there are no parts numbers or pairings and no assembly instructions. If the assembly were obvious, this would be fine. Unfortunately, figuring out the arm pairings and the corresponding bodies is… quite hard.

Despite this, I managed to cobble together a few poses which felt approximately like what might have been intended. It was a little irritating not to be able to get the gunner to be proper ‘hands on’ to the grips. I’m sure this is possible – I just couldn’t figure it out! He also seemed to be levitating slightly, again, this is probably avoidable but a solution wasn’t immediately obvious except to build up the earth under the model at the basing stage. I did my best using the pictures on the back of the box but some proper instructions would have really helped. 

Fortunately it was smoother sailing with the other two crew members. The prone loader figure went together ok. I had made my life harder by choosing a smallish (50mm) base, as I find anything wider has no hope of fitting in a trench during gameplay. To make things lineup I cut down the ammo feed piece and put the prone figure at a slightly jaunty (but plausible) angle. 

The last crew figure, the kneeling figure, has a lot more options for viable arms, including the classic binoculars. I decided to go off piste and went for a ‘drinking from canteen’ arm (a really nice touch in the kit) and a slight conversion of a resting arm using a spare gasmask head. Voila, one NCO ripping off his gas mask as soon as the all clear sounds to take a drink. Hope it works out for him. 

As there’s not much personal equipment, all I did was attach a few canteens and with that we’re done! 

Painting 

This isn’t a painting article, so I’ll keep it brief. The models paint up nicely and the details are a good size for getting at with a brush. For some reason I always seem to find the backs of the WA German sculpts a bit of a challenge to paint convincingly, but there you go, at least it’s the backs not the fronts! I went for some late war camouflage for some spice. 

Comparison to STL Version

It’s worth saying that the German machine gun team is also available from WA Digital as an STL for home 3D printing. Last year I printed and painted up a few of the STL versions, so it’s worth doing a quick comparison to the plastics for those interested:

• The machine gun is much larger on the plastic kit. It’s clearly been scaled up to improve its robustness. I did have plenty of difficulty with the 3D print version (in the end, I built the machine gun and gunner in blender, added a puddle base, and printed it as one piece), so I think this was a very sensible decision by WA for the plastics. 
• There are more options with the plastic kit in terms of arms poses etc, which is great. 
• The scaling of the crew seems to be the same. 

Conclusion 

Pros

• Plenty of head and arm options mean lots of pose optionality.
• Robust machine gun/sled fixes the issues with the STL version and is visually impactful. 
• Easy to convert new poses/vignettes due to the nature of multi-part plastics.
• Covers most of the war (1915 onwards).
• Good kitbashing potential for games like Trench Crusade, The Last War, A War Transformed etc. 

Cons

• Lack of assembly instructions/part numbers makes for a frustrating experience.
• Very limited personal gear for the crew. 
• Water hoses are quite fragile (but not egregiously so). 
• A little pricey – for the same pricepoint (£25) you can get a box of 30 plastic German infantry from WA, or for £2 more, three metal MGs with crew from Great War Miniatures or another manufacturer (albeit with more limited pose availability). 

Overall this is a good kit worth having and a useful way to get some backup on the table for your rifle platoons.

However, it does feel like there it would have been better to use the (finite) sprue space to provide more personal equipment for the crew rather than two complete ‘poses’ for the machine gun itself. Some assembly instructions for the myriad arm options and an extra sprue in each box (i.e. enough for an MG platoon) would also sweeten the deal! 

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