Well, we had a review of the “Battery” (meaning a grouping of artillery weapons), we should probably have a review of the Assault as well. It seems only fitting. As such, I’m here with another of the plastic kits from DreamForge. This time around it’s the Valkir Assault Troops.
As before, DreamForge was kind enough to send me a box to let you know about.
So get ready to storm the enemy, it’s time for another TGN Review. This time it’s the Valkir Assault Troopers box set from DreamForge-Games.
As one would expect, there are a lot of similarities between this kit and the heavy weapons kit I put together recently. There are some differences, though, beyond just how the figures are armed.
The first thing that’s different is that while the Heavy Weapons troopers had only 3 different styles of legs, each of the Assault Troopers have different legs. In fact, this whole kit is designed to be put together pretty much one way. The parts are labeled with a letter and number to show which figure it’s supposed to go with. You have troopers A, B, C, D, and E. Generally speaking, the parts are equivalent to the parts from the Heavy Weapons unit. You have two legs and a pelvis that go together. Then there’s the cloth and armor pieces that go around that. The upper half of the figure is made with a torso in two halves, a backpack, arms, sometimes separate hands, weapons, head, and shoulder pads.
Here you can see all the pieces required to put together Trooper D. And before some points it out, yes, there are two of the same-side of legs. The sprue was, unfortunately, mis-labeled and I only noticed after I’d taken the photo and started to assemble the mini. Obviously that caused a bit of confusion, but I soon fixed it, finding the proper leg to go with the model.
An interesting thing with this kit is that not all the figures are carrying the same type of gun. You only get 4 of any one type of weapon, so at least one guy is going to be armed a little differently. Since DreamForge doesn’t have their own rules set out yet, and I’m not going to be using these guys as stand-ins for anything (at least, I don’t plan on it), I just had one of the “troopers” get the different gun. Model C does have a different sword than the rest, I assume to be a squad leader. Also, since not all of the figures are holding their gun in their hand, you either leave off the gun or just sort of glue it onto the figure somewhere, as I did. There’s no specific “the gun goes here” that I could find for these couple of troopers, so I just had to sort of guess.
You do have a little bit of options in how the figures look. There are a few extra armor pieces that you can put around the legs if you wish. I felt it looked a bit bulky. There are also 3 different head styles to go with. I used a second type that’s somewhat close to what I used for the Heavy Weapons troopers, but was different (the kit does include the same style of head from the Heavy Weapon unit). The third type is the same used on the troopers in the APC. I picked the ones I did because these suits have always reminded me of the judges from FFXII. I like the way those guys look, so I kept that going here.
I’ve always been happy with the DreamForge kits. They go together fairly smoothly. The plastic is easy to work with. There’s little or no mold lines. And one thing I appreciated, having just put together that Overkill set: there are fewer connection points, in general, between pieces and the sprue for these kits than there was for the GW kit. This might not sound like a lot, but it does mean less cleaning require per-piece, which can really speed up assembly.
You can pick up your own Valkir Assault Troopers over in the DreamForge-Games webshop here.