Back at Christmas we had some shelfies of
this set sent in by Terranova, to which I muttered 'Lucky buggers across the pond, Walmart Exclsive, fussa-russa....&etc.'
and vowed to look out for them at Asda,
then, still Walmart's subsidiary over
here (I believe they've announced plans to off-load it?), but then the week
before May's show (for which I should have been saving my pennies) I found this
on clearance in Smyths for a tenner -
it hadn't been there at all a few weeks earlier?
So not an 'Walmart Exclusive' at all, and while I thank Brian again for the
earlier shelfies, we can now tick the close-up box!
The "Bonus"
base is also the lid, so if there was no 'bonus' the contents would presumably fly
everywhere, thus we see the 'fake-news' hype of highfalutin' sales-talk in
action! I also said at Christmas that I liked the sniper, cable-tied to the
lid, but not enough to hang-on to him [with the lid], so the lid went to
charity with the tub, half-full of the duplicate poses.
Before sorting; the box has a tall wedge of
card running-up inside, through the centre, but it's not that wide at the
bottom, and to be fair to Lanard,
seems to have less to do with 'padding-out' falsely and more to do with ensuring
that the numerous contents are displayed in a tall, slim container, by keeping
them pressed against the sides.
The figures, mostly based on the old Galoob X-panders figures as
previously stated. The prone figure has a soft jungle-hat and would seem to be
a more recent addition, and all of them have been 'de-spaced' and brought back
to planet earth with a 'Fritz' helmet and an urban-warfare, light belt-order
make-over! Weapons are still quite spacey though.
Two machine-guns are supplied loose (you need four!) in the
set, they fit into two holes on the lid, and both a sandbag position and a
small stand found among the contents, the latter is supposed to sit behind a
rather lame 'sanger' made of three pieces, these are the colour-matched
accessories 'sand' force get!
Bit's of artwork you may be interested-in;
the figures in the artwork are a sort of fantasy/post-apocalyptic mix of
cyber-punk ner'do wells bearing no relationship with the figures included
whatsoever!
The other contents, the barbed-wire
'entanglements' went to charity along with the two sandbag barricades, but I
kept the security fences, they are quite useful, as are the angle-iron beach
obstacles/tank traps.
The tank supplied to red-force is a generic
M1-Abrahms/Challenger-I type thing and was kept for it's similarity to other
simple 'readymades', from the green-force armory; the plane went, but I hung-on
to the helicopter.
Again - while a lot of this is typical 'padding' it hasn't been enhanced with a bunch of crappy farm fence, trees, cactuses or palms, which is another point in Lanard's favour? It's war you want - it's war you get!
The 'walker' is lovely - from the front!
But from the back reveals it's cheapness, as a hollowed-out single moulding,
likewise the revolving 'head' looks fine from above, but at least it's hollow
is hidden while in situ. One day I will fill it in with two-part epoxy, add a
few greeblies and paint it, before posing it with 28mm fig's!
The three part helicopter is a bit sci-fi
but equally, similar machines are coming into service or are under development,
so it's gone in the Heli-zone, the 'plane went - for obvious reasons - and you
can see that the tank is simpler that Airfix's venerable old mouldings.
Trying to photograph - one-handed - a
tank-hunter on a thread creeping-up on a robot killing-machine (when the thread
is in the other hand) proved a bit of a tall order, so it's a tad fuzzy!
