Medieval Knights are a staple of historicals wargaming and it’s a rare mini collector that hasn’t at least thought about strapping on some plate and mail in order to mount a trusty steed, but plastic knights always leave a little to be desired. With Medieval gaming all the rage on Goonhammer Historicals at the moment, it’s the turn of the Victrix Medieval Knight kit to get our review treatment.
Before getting into the kit, let’s thank Victrix for sending these out for review.
Look, I’ll level with you. This is a really, really nice kit. It blows the nearest plastic competitors out of the water, and will be a staple of medieval gaming going forward. Beyond that, it’s also an exciting one that – especially with the additional Fantasy heads – should be seen as a major competitor to fantasy knight lines too, far surpassing the aged Bretonnian plastics. Let’s dive into why.
Getting Knightly
The Knights come in the now familiar and much loved Victrix Bag, with 18 mounted knights over several sprues (horses and riders separated) for a bloody good price. They’re dynamic, full of movement and realistic momentum and, for once, the instructions are really clear and unambiguous!
It’s another kit in the 12th to mid 13th century time period, so your knights here are armed with a variety of different weapons, mostly in full mail with surcoats and horse barding with a massive range of different heads (18, so if you want everyone can have a different head!). They’ll work well for The Barons’ War, Crusades, The Anarchy, France Vs Angevin England and everything else you can imagine in the High Medieval.
With the variety of heads and weapons on offer, you could further narrow this down to a particular conflict if you wanted to. I made mine with a series of heads chosen for the cool factor alone, which if I was really really intent on modelling a particular decade wouldn’t have worked. However, the kit has a selection of heads for early and later helms – even a fair few for the middle of the advertised range. You get early Enclosed Helmets and early Great Helms galore in the set, and the neck joints can easily take Norman helmets if you wanted to portray the exact period between the adoption of the surcoat and the invention of the Enclosed Helm. Kite, flat top and heater shields in the set let you carry that time period theming through to the arms as well.
I feel a little like a broken record with Victrix kits when talking about the sculpt quality. It’s great, as always. Poses are well thought through, particularly the Knights leaning/bracing backwards into the charge, but they’re all excellent. The movement in the models has to be seen to really get across how well put together it is, carefully matching surcoat and caparison will allow you to put together some fantastically realistic charging Knights.
Fine mail without 1mm sized rings is a very difficult ask and, while I like my Normans a lot, the scale of their mail rings is pretty chunky – you could fit an arrow right through it – and the mail is much, much finer here. That doesn’t compromise on painting as a good ol’ drybrush and wash will pick it out just fine. Where issues can arise is in the very minimal clean-up, and there’s a few arms where I scraped away a mould line to find I’d smoothed off a section of mail along with it. The perennial problem everyone faces with mail, where texture that wraps around the mould loses detail in the casting process, I could only see on two arms on the sprue. That’s absolutely crazy – another little miracle in mould design pulled off here by the Victrix team.
Construction is fairly simple – somewhere between the Mounted Normans (easy) and the Napoleonic Dragoons (fiendish). Horses are in four pieces and riders in five (including shields), making for a couple of minutes for each knight. With 18 in the bag, you’re making them all up in an evening, which is a nice little project.
Comparisons
In comparison to the Fireforge Templars (now quite an old kit), we can see much more realistic proportions and poses. The horses are larger, the riders have longer legs and arms and better proportioned heads. Weapons, hands and shields are all much finer – these feel like miniature humans, not humans crammed into a 28mm heroic-style scale.
Much the same applies to the Bretonnian comparison too – the old Knights of the Realm have some serious proportion issues in the arms, pushing them up into Gorilla territory. None of that finer scaling leads to brittle weapons and easily snapped lances though, especially with the crouched arms where there’s a good amount of connection between lance and arm, as they’re sculpted in one piece this creates a flexible piece even when projecting above or forward of the main body of the model. These are a modern, well designed plastic Knight kit, and it shows.
Transfer Sheets
Victrix also sent over the Little Big Men Studios Transfer sets that accompanied the knight release. As we’ve recently fallen in love with these transfer sets (you can read us waxing lyrical about Norman and Viking sets if you like), I was happy to see these are of the same quality. The shield transfers work as well as you’d expect, but I was really surprised to see how well the horse caparison transfers worked. Each set is divided into four transfers – front and back for left and right sides per horse sculpt – and they work perfectly, clearly designed to fit onto each sculpt where they follow the folds and creases of the caparison. Anyone who’s tried to add flat transfers to curved surfaces will know what a stress this is, but these ones have very clearly been made to address that – they just work in a really satisfying manner.
I used the simple Templar crosses set for my knights, but I’ll be going back to the rest of the pack to try out the more complicated heraldric schemes. If you’re using the sheet shown above, I think a perfect colour match might be tricky, so plan accordingly. The slight thickness of the transfers works well for crucignatus – I like to imagine that they’re separate pieces sewn on to the barding cloth.
Fantasy Heads
Shortly after we received this kit (and I’d already built all of mine) Victrix announced the Fantasy and Medieval head kit as an add-on to this one. I haven’t got my hands on it (yet), but thought it was worth talking about because it really opens this kit up.
If you want Fantasy Knights for Warhammer, Swan Knights from LOTR, Teutonic Knights for northern crusades or just want to do some late 13th century style helms for Historicals, I think it’s well worth a look. The only thing stopping you from using these far, far, nicer knights for Warhammer is a lack of faux-late-medieval helms – and here they are!
Charge!
Overall this is another absolutely stellar kit that will take some real beating for high Medieval knights. With lots of alternatives out there in both fantasy and historicals, it’s great to see the modern kit for Medieval Knights that we’ve been waiting for. With more from this range on the horizon it’s a really fantastic time to get into 12th-13th century gaming, and you’ll see a lot more from me in this period in the future.
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