Thank you to Wargames Atlantic for providing a box of their Classic Fantasy: Landsknecht Ogres for review. If you’d like to pick up this kit and support Goonhammer while you’re at it, get it through our affiliate link.
The Contents
The Landsknecht Ogres kit was the result of a competition run by Wargames Atlantic on their website back in 2021. Readers submitted ideas for a new box set which went through multiple rounds of voting, with Michael Stockdale’s suggestion ultimately winning out.
Each box of Landsknecht Ogres builds nine models, with three each of two different sprue designs. Why so many sprues? This kit contains components to build your ogres with an array of traditional fantasy weapons, but also allows them to be built as “The Vain” for Wargames Atlantic’s Death Fields setting, a group of abducted Landsknecht forced to fight on the circuit and eventually being modified into abhumans to be more competitive. So alongside the more traditional halberds, zweihanders and matchlock weapons you’ll find autoguns, shotguns and modern combat knives on the sprues.
Honestly this is such a fantastic range of parts to include in a kit. Alongside the broad array of arms, generally labelled in pairs where important, there’s a great selection of heads ranging from simple pot helms through to military berets. The expressions aren’t that varied, but it’s hard to criticise that when the faces are otherwise pretty characterful.
Size wise, these miniatures are firmly 28mm scale – they look large and imposing next to other WGA miniatures and Games Workshop human scale models, but are slightly dwarfed by GW’s Ogor Mawtribes range, and even the Astra Militarum Ogryns.
The Build
In general, I found that this kit went together really well. I did have one pair of arms that I really struggled with, holding a zweihander in a two-handed grip. In the official photos this model is shown to be holding his sword at a low rest angle, but I found that this left me with a choice of a very misaligned wrist join, or a large gap at the shoulder. In the end I opted for leaving the gap at the shoulder, which I then fillled with superglue and baking powder. With the model primed, it’s not really noticeable, and you could definitely do a much neater job of filling the gap with putty if you were more patient than me.
Beyond that one pair of arms, I didn’t have any issue with the build. Having bought an extra box myself, I was actually assembling a batch of 18 ogres at once, trying to sort them into units of three similar weapons plus a couple of characters. I will just note, from a first glance across the sprues I was quite excited about the customisation available – the sprue is presented as three bodies in different poses, with three different breastplates to attach to the front of the models. I had assumed that this would lead to a lot of different pose/armour combinations, but each breastplate only fits with one pose, leading to quite a lot of repetition. I don’t think it’s that noticeable in the end product, but I was slightly disappointed in the moment.
Still, I had a great time assembling these ogres over a couple of evenings and I’m impressed with the range of options. In the end I managed to assemble units of ogres with halberds, two-handed swords, hand weapons and shields, a block of six with ranged weapons, plus a couple of characters that I managed to convert slightly to stand out (there is no right-handed pistol in the kit, so I had to mash that together from other parts). I also built one of the ogres as a member of the Vain, just to have a look at the build. Here, too, there’s a huge range of parts and options.
Painting and Basing
Everything on this kit is really well-moulded, meaning it takes my preferred method of batch painting (drybrush plus contrast, slapchop, whatever you want to call it) like a champ. The ogres were primed with Colour Forge Desert Sand, before being drybrushed with ivory and then gently with white.
Everything was based in a yellow scheme (Iyanden Yellow) with pink/purple details (Sigvald Burgundy), with a variety of browns filling in undershirts, leathers, woods and the like, and for the skin I used Guilliman Flesh for the light skin and Cygor Brown for the dark skin. in hindsight I wish I’d gone with a slightly lighter brown or mixed in some flesh tone for the dark skin, because it was incredibly dark and that slowed down my layering a bit later on.
Metallics were filled in with Iron Hands Steel for silvers, and Retributor Armour for the gold areas, before being washed with Agrax Earthshade.
Finally some details like eyes, fangs and toenails were filled in, the yellow got a gentle drybrush of Dorn Yellow, and the burgundy was highlighted with Pink Horror. For a more detailed look at the basis of this scheme, please check out Sonic Sledgehammer’s video on painting the kit here. I used this video for the majority of my scheme and I’d like to shout it out as a great, easy to follow tutorial.
For the sci-fi model I followed the same steps as above, but I filled in the beret with a brown and the combat armour with Creed Camo contrast paint.
I’m going to be using these models for Kings of War, so I chose to base my units on appropriately sized square/rectangular bases, which I sourced from Warbases in the UK, and I put the single Vain model on a 40mm round base. These were basecoated with Diorama FX Russian Mud from Vallejo. Once that was dry I stuck on some large tufts from Gamer’s Grass, then applied PVA glue and sprinkled on a mix of a forest floor mix, which looks like it’s probably coconut coir, plus a heather flock. After some time to dry, the whole lot was spritzed with isopropyl alcohol and then soaked in thinned down PVA. This sets rock solid and holds all the different basing mixes together, and I think overall this is quite a convincing natural forest floor.
Finally the base rims were painted with black, and the models got an all over coat of Tamiya TS-80 Flat Clear spray.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I’m really pleased with this kit. The weapons are varied enough that you can get a load of different unit loadouts out of the box, and the variety of heads and hats means that you can add quite a lot of variation to what initially feels like quite a limited 3 poses. I think if you enjoy lavishing time and effort on your minis it would be really fun to paint each ogre in different colours and heraldry and end up with a technicolour horde of big lads.
From the Kings of War point of view I think the kit is a great proposition – you can quite easily make 400 or so points worth of units out of box, including some options for converting characters. From this box I made a Sergeant, a Boomer Sergeant, and a regiment each of Boomers and Warriors. I do think there’s a bit of limitation here if you wanted to make some of the more esoteric Ogre units like Siege Breakers with their large shields, or Berserker Braves, but with a bit of converting and kitbashing you could get there easily. Wargames Atlantic also offer products for 3D printing through their Atlantic Digital range, so it is feasible that they might choose to expand the Landsknecht Ogre range through that avenue in the future – they already offer some great ogres in plate armour.
I find The Vain to be a bit of a stranger proposition in this kit – I’m not sure anyone was crying out for ogres wearing combat gear up top and Landsknecht trousers, but they are definitely interesting and I do like that WGA have gone to the effort of explaining how they fit into the fiction of Death Fields. Still, there are plenty of parts on the sprue whether you’re buying them solely for fantasy or sci-fi use, so it’s not exactly a complaint!
In conclusion then this is a really fun kit to build and paint, and could find a spot in a lot of peoples’ collections.
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