A thank you to Victrix for sending out this kit of Medieval Crossbowmen and Archers for free for review purposes.

The short version is that this is an excellent kit. But look, you already knew that; it's a new Victrix kit and bag after bag from them the last few years has been nothing short of fantastic. If you're new to Victrix kits then you read that right, these sprues come in bags not boxes just like milk in Canada. Bag minis rule.

What's in the Bag

You get five identical sprues. Simple. Each sprue has six bodies, nine crossbows, seven bows, nineteen heads, and a whole host of accessories including sheathed short swords, bundles of arrows, and bags of bolts. Everything you could possibly want to build thirty crossbowmen or archers or any mix in between! Personally I think this bag has one sprue too many, if such a thing is possible, but I'm approaching this entirely from a Saga mindset where two points of Levy would have been perfect for me.

You are supposed to build only two of the bodies of each sprue with bows and the other four with crossbows, with those pieces labelled clearly against each other on the instructions, however with a very small amount of hobbying skill you can very easily make all of the them either archers or crossbowmen. Yes, technically speaking some of the belts on the models won't be historically accurate then and if that bothers you that's fine, you'll be able to build ten archers and twenty crossbowmen from this set. If that doesn't bother you because realistically when you're playing a game no one will even notice then it'll take a very small amount of hobby skill to use any body with nearly any set of arms, some work better than others. The archer bodies lean back a little which can look a little awkward with a crossbow, but if I was handed a crossbow I'd probably look a little awkward with it too. I really don't see this as much of an issue and have been able to build two complete sprues of twelve models total entirely as crossbowmen that look good.

Victrix Crossbowmen, Credit: Lenoon

The torsos themselves are a mix of two chain shirts, one gambeson with chain underneath, one cloth with chain underneath, and two gambesons without chain. This is the only place you'll find making all-archers a little awkward without any chain bow arms and two full chain shirt bodies, up to you how you want to handle that. Options to me would be simply not care, greenstuff some chain onto the arms, or forgo making everyone an archer and "only" have up to twenty four archers out of this bag.

Across the heads, as you might have come to expect from Victrix the quality of faces is just wonderful and only one body uses a different connection point from the other five for which heads it can use.

One detail that I'm very happy about here is that the crossbows themselves have the cord sculped onto them, the bows do not and I think that's fine since bowstring is finer and harder to look good on a scale model of this size. Extra points for also having a bolt fitted on the poses that are ready to shoot!

Victrix Medieval Crossbowmen - credit Bair

Compatibility

I haven't done any bashing between these two kits since I didn't have any unbuilt (or unpainted) foot sergeants to hand to try, but looking at my spares on those sprues and comparing the two sprues together it's very clear that these have been made to be able to work together. I'd recommend using the arms that aren't trying to connect together at all for maximum ease but using these sprues together will be a great way to use leftover bits from either kit for more variation, especially if you're wanting more chainmail or gambeson bodies specifically for either melee or ranged weapon guys.

Whatever you're trying to do here, both of these kits use the exact same connection points on all of the arms and share connection points for various heads, too, which cannot be a mistake. Some Victrix kits have some awkwardly different arm connections where different amounts of an arm is sculpted to the body so I'm really, really, happy to see that that's not the case between these bags.

Scale Comparisons

These are 28mm scale humans and scale very well with the Victrix Foot Knights perfectly. They also scale well with Wargames Atlantic's (WGA) Baron's War range of Foot Serjeants that stand very slightly taller in some poses and are broadly speaking a touch wider. The WGA kit came out last year and it's a nice kit, the main difference being that you get both ranged and melee weapons out of one box instead of the two entirely separate kits that Victrix does. Naturally having wholly distinct kits is going to lead to more variation and options in posing so this comes down to simply taste and convenience depending on the game you're building for. The paint jobs on these are identical, same mostly-Pro-Acryl colours, same washes, and same Ammo by MIG Lucky Ultra Matte brushed-on varnish. What I do want to point out between these two kits is the level of detail on the gambeson and the depth of detail on the chainmail as well as the level of detail on the faces.

Left two models: Victrix Medieval Crossbowmen
Right two models: Wargames Atlantic Foot Serjeants

I've been painting up a force of Knights Hospitaller that was originally intended for Saga but has accidentally grown to mass army size, instead, with Victrix deciding to come out with gorgeous plastics after I've already painted up lots of other makes of models. Fortunately that means I get a lot of variation in my collection but also means you get to see how these look next to a few different company's models. These all look pretty great next to each other and on the tabletop from a couple feet away there will be absolutely no issue at all in scale or anything like that. I'll be using this kit mixed in and amongst the rest when setting up for mass battle game systems; mostly thinking Sword & Spear, Midgard, and Nevermind the Billhooks here.

L to R: Wargames Atlantic Foot Serjeant, Victrix Medieval Crossbowman, Victrix Foot Knight, Footsore Military Order Knight on Foot

Final Thoughts

If you've read this far and still are not sure if I think this kit is great then you didn't even read my intro and instead just skipped down here. I do respect wanting to cut to the chase, which is why I did that for you in the first line of this piece already.

A mixed bag (ho ho ho) of Sergeants and Crossbows. Credit: Lenoon

This is an excellent kit. I really don't have any complaints at all, I like how compatible it is with the foot sergeants sprues, I like how detailed the faces, bodies, arms, weapons, and accessories are (even if I didn't use much of those), and I really like how they scale so well with other medieval models from other makers. They just work. For the games I'm interested in playing, which are not very small skirmish games, these bags work perfectly for me and I like the added amount of variety afforded by being specific, separate, kits. That's absolutely not going to be for everyone though! Fortunately there's plenty of third party sellers out there that will sell you a single sprue, too, if you don't want a full thirty of these.

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Tags: historicals | victrix | medieval | miniature reviews