Reviewing the Trench Crusade Plastic Prussians

 

Yeah look I'm not becoming a review guy, this is just part of a larger project of psy opping my LGS into stocking more non GW stuff (it's not working).

I have a little bit of baggage with Trench Crusade. Now, what I'm about to go over is pretty well tread ground, so if you've followed the whole saga of Trench Crusade feel free to skip to the next paragraph. I backed the original Kickstarter campaign, in July of 2022. That first campaign was for a group of handsculpted miniatures to be made by James Sherriff based on Mike Franchina's artwork and world building project. The original timeline was hoping to deliver Q1 2023. I and most of the people I talked to got their minis in Q3 2024. From what I know (the team was quite transparent) the delay was mostly due to going for Siocast as the casting material for the minis. In my grumpy days I think it was predictable that a proprietary product needing a proprietary machine would be a bad choice, especially when the caster, Zealot Miniatures, does really nice resin casts. But ultimately it was not their fault. I was unimpressed with the quality of the material in the end. Some not great vent placement, some bits that still had to be resin and a huge pain to cleanup the moldlines made it a frustrating experience that undersold the great sculpts and concepts. So after a year and a half of delays, we had some minis with issues, and, out of nowhere, a game. When I signed up for the kickstarter, Trench Crusade the game was not a thing. So when it got announced in may 2023, I was a little surprised that they were embarking on another big project while the kickstarter was still struggling. And then a bunch of 40k larpers and associated internet nazis got wind of the game, and invaded the 28 Mag discord. They were promptly kicked out, but a vocal chunk of the community around the game is still comprised of these lobotomites, so if you ever click on a TC video on youtube, there's a decent chance you're about to hear some stupid shit. (It did spawn a few nice terrain videos to be fair but the hobby content around the game is basically completely drowned out by lore slop).

This whole saga left a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth, so when the campaign rolled in for the game proper in october 2024, I knew I would most likely not join, unless they were offering something really special. I was quite sad to see the negative siocast experience led them to go fully digital for the sculpting and towards printing as a method of production. The sculpts they offered in this second campaign were IMO pretty hit and miss. A lot of them had way too much detail (like actually too much, not "I'm seventy, there's too much shit on my warhammers" too much), in a very 3D Sculptor way. I am not prejudiced btw, some of my best friends are 3D sculptors. Taking the artilery witch as an example, it's one of the most iconic designs from Franchina's work and the sculpt looks like this :

 

Oh yeah that glove detail is definitely paintable, for sure yeah

The embroidery of the original design being sculpted on really feels like painting wasn't taken into account. This issue crops up a lot across this gen of Trench Crusade models and it ends up underselling the quality of the original concepts in a number of cases. But mostly it makes me miss the sculpts James Sherrif did for the first campaign. The large lanky gun guy in the original campaign feels very inspired by a recurring figure in James's work. I don't know what name he gives this guy but I find it fascinating that he keeps going back to this design for other projects. And Sherrif's universe blending with Franchina's was a nice draw to the project originally. It felt like a collaboration based on mutual fascinations.

 

Anyway that's enough history, let's get to the present with the release of Trench Crusade's first official plastic sprue kit. I'm very glad they're starting plastics because it is very clear most of the player base cannot be trusted to opperate a 3D printer safely, and thus switching to sprues means they'll save many lives in the process ! Amusingly, there seems to be a contingent of printer bros in the Trench Crusade community who feel betrayed by the upgrade to plastic. I guess this kind of comes with the territory when your community seems deathly allergic to kitbashin. These sprues are produced by Archon Studio, so if you're familiar with their current plastic you'll know it's solidly made and the plastic is very pleasant to work with. I'd never purchased any of their figure kits before, mostly because I think the designs were quite bad. With the art direction from TC however, that issue is gone. There are a lot of bits on here which are quite unique and look very cool. The box comes with a sprue and a half, a baggy of bases, and that's it ! The online instruction booklet comes with rules to play these and a bit of background which is neat, and I wish that had been printed in a proper booklet.

As you can see from this detail of the sprue layout, these look a lot more like what Games Workshop offers rather that what you can see from Wargames Atlantic or Victrix. And the same goes for the construction of the minis. The options here are quite similar to how a Kill Team box works : each character has a couple of bespoke loadouts you can pick between. I don't mind it but it is very much a marmite thing, and I get being disappointed in that design choice for a skirmish game with loads of options. Beyond this, there are some sculpting choices that I find very strange.

In the picture above, my knife points to a small trench (😎) running around the eagle symbol sculpted on the chest. I can kind of guess this is an attempt at "contrast friendly" sculpting (if it is, stop), but in reality I have no idea why this is here. In the picture bellow, I started shaving the eagle to convert one of the figures and you can still see the gap. In my case, since I was going to sculpt over it, it wasn't much of an issue but if you're looking for a smooth armor plate, get ready to fill gaps.

The cape on this model comes with a very nasty undercut and is kind of confusingly sculpted. I'm not quite sure where the inside of the cape that is folding out ends and the back proper begins. The instruction unfortunately don't cover the work of carving the undercut which you need to do to make the cape look good.

The plastic on archon kits is mercifully a little bit softer than GW but carving this out was still a pain.

 

Now, onto something only I care about : the bases. Dear reader I must confess something truly terrible to you today. Something that brings me great shame and I dare not speak about at my local game store. In fact, let me get it out right here : I care obsessively about base shapes. And I'm not talking about square vs circle, such pedestrian concerns are below me. I'm talking about Height, and I'm talking about Bevelling. I will refuse to play entire game systems because of their inellegant bases. Infinity ? Bevel too steep + forces overhangs. Star Wars Legion ? Takes the offensive steepness and brings it to a even worse level by making they bases comically high. Malifaux ? Repulsive curved edge. If there is one realm where I will say Games Workshop genuinely makes the best product on the market, it is bases. Despite some measurement quirks, they show tremendously elegant angle to their bevel, are the perfect height, and come with a conviniently grippy textured top. Truly a vision of heaven. I say all this to make you understand that when I say the bases in this kit are very close to perfection, I do not mean it lightly. Look at this comparison :

GW 32 on the left, Archon 32 on the right. Close to perfection, just too few facets on the edge...

 Thanks for indulging me, now I'll get back to more interesting features of the kit. After building most of the body of the soldier I wanted to kitbash, I set up a little comparison shot :

Left to right : Victrix body, Perry body, Trench Crusade Prussian guy (which was supposed to go on a 25mm base but that's insane), GW Mk3 space marine, Original Trench Crusade kickstarter model, Wargames atlantic skeleton.

So yeah, the elephant in the room is how absolutely massive these miniatures are. The sculpts here are firmly in the realm of 35mm scale, which is a major bummer. As you can see the basic troopers can go eye to eye with a new space marine kit and absolutely dwarf any human 28mm model. They will look out of place alongside GW Imperial Guard, and even crazier besides historical minis which you want to be using to kitbash your TC warbands. Hell, compare them to the original kickstarter and they tower over those too ! I don't mind mixing 28-32mm models usually, more often than not it ends up looking more like natural variation than anything else. But I think these cross firmly into the realm of looking too large. This is especially annoying when attempting to kitbash with them because while current GW heads and hands fit fine on them, the torsos are too large to fit with GW legs. In the end 35mm is a really janky choice of scale, as almost nothing is compatible. 

finished bash for a mystery project

Before closing this review, let me leave you with a cursed observation that I haven't been able to let go off since I noticed it. If you scroll back up and look at the box cover, you can see that every sculpt in here except one, does the "one knee up on a rock, one leg back" pose. I find it extremely funny that almost all of the models in this box do the same pose for some inexplicable reason.

So, in the end, is this a worthy purchase ? At 40€ MSRP (provided the distrubutor doesn't upcharge like in my case) for 8 minis, I'm gonna say no. The assembled sculpts are nice, don't get me wrong, but this kit has enough issues that the cool bits don't really make up for what I've outlined here. I think future kits really need to fix the scale problem, hopefully shrinking to within the 28-32 range, include way more loadout options, as well as obviously provide more diverse poses, though I will miss the unintentional comedy. If the next few releases adress these points, I think this range will be a slam dunk. But right now, unless you need some giants in your skirmish games, this box is a safe skip.

 

Tanks everyone for tuning in to the blog, happy holidays, see you in january for a normal post, guaranteed review free !