War of Liberation: HaT Prussian Landwehr

A few years back you may recall that HaT Figures, manufacturers of 20mm soft plastic figures, dipped their toes in the 28mm hard plastic market releasing several boxes of Napoleonics and an El Cid range. Whilst the Napoleonics were nice figures (indeed I use some as my Italian Light Infantry skirmishers) they were slightly smaller and less bulky than figures produced by their competitors such as Perry's, Wargames Atlantic, Victrix etc. and, presumably after not proving as popular as hoped, releases ceased.

Lessons learned, HaT are moving back into the 28mm hard plastic market with releases of Napoleonics and American War of Independence soon to be forthcoming. HaT were kind enough to send me a pre-release sprue each of the new (2001) Prussian Landwehr Marching and (2002) Prussian Landwehr in Action.

Dealing with the elephant in the room, compatibility with other ranges as you can see from this photo they scale well height and bulk wise with other Prussian plastics (left to right - Perry Infantry, Wargames Atlantic Reserve Infantry, HaT Landwehr, Warlord Games Landwehr).

To be clear the miniatures are hard plastic, the same as Perry's, Victrix etc, NOT the soft plastic HaT uses for its other ranges. The marching box (2001) will contain 40 figures, each sprue holding ten. The figures are either one piece castings or two with a separate back pack that you can glue on with plastic cement as you do with Perry's etc.

The figures are reasonably well detailed, not as sharp as Perry's but similar to the Warlord Landwehr and Wargames Atlantic Reserve Infantry. They certainly are good enough for the wargames table. The bayonets are a bit thick, which is good in that they should not ping off like Perry models during game play.  I would consider just filing the tops a bit with a quick swipe of a file to make them more pointed.

Some of the figures have backpacks which fit well enough, however the cartridge box is affixed to this and can end up not snug to the body. It took less than a minute to cut them off the backpacks and glue them directly to the figure.

The Action set (2002) - also 40 figures - is very useful given the absolute dearth of Landwehr other than in marching poses (the Landwehr were able to skirmish!). Like the Marching set I would file the top of the bayonets and I fixed the cartridge boxes but aside from that I was happy with the pose variety which should give me some good Skirmishers for Sharp Practice!

All in all this is a decent first step back into the 28mm market by HaT. The detail could be a little sharper and I hope HaT consider manufacturing them in a nice boring grey plastic not the bright blue the samples came in! I'm not sure about the price point, but HaT usually offer very good value so hopefully this will continue.

Along with the American War of Independence range HaT have as coming soon, they have now extended the 2000 series list to include Landwehr command, as well as Hungarian, Austrian and Russian Napoleonic troops, which all sounds very promising...