Wargames Atlantic Afghans

I ordered these from Northstar as soon as they were released. I've been wanting to expand my Afghan horde for TMWWBK for a while so these seemed ideal - 40 models for £25 - bargain.
They then sat in the shed for a week or two, fermenting.

And then I played TSatF and that was all the inspiration I needed to dig them out for a little play.

So what do you get in the box?
8 sprues like this

 T'other side

There are five bodies on each sprue. Including a kneeling one - nice touch for mountain dwelling guerrilla fighters. The detail looks relatively deep, so they should be easy to paint and take washes well.

There are five arms carrying rifles (1) and muskets (4) with two more muskets and another rifle also on the sprue.

And four arms holding swords. There's also a punch dagger thingy.

All the arms are numbered and letters as pairs, important for the gun arms when one of the hands is cast on the gun and you have to match it up to a sleeve.
For the other single arms mixing and matching should be possible.
Plus of course these are plastic so hand and weapon swaps should be relatively straightforward

There are eleven heads three in skull caps. With a mix of beards and face coverings. They're animated but not excessively cartoony.

 There are also four shields and several swords in sheaths.

The plastic is hard - surprisingly so - almost brittle. I was alittle worried getting some of the more slender items off the sprue.
The bodies and arms seem fairly realistically proportioned - they're not at the chunky end of the 28mm spectrum - but they're definitely wargames soldiers, not scale models.
Some of the heads seem a big - perhaps it's the turbans - but they felt a little out of scale.

The arms and weapons take advantage of the plastic medium to be realistically slender. Which makes for a nice model but also makes them a bit fiddly.
I hate guns where you have one arm attached them have to glue the other arm on to meet it. I know it's really hard to do the two arms attached thing, but it's such a faff to assemble with all the different joints drying and slipping at the same time.
Aesthetically though I think the Wargames Atlantic approach of casting one hand on the weapon is better than the cupped hand and slot in weapon version.
But I did swear while doing this.

This head went on nicely. it's a flat join, not a ball and socket, so motion is a bit more limited and you have to make sure it lines up.

Several of the other heads ended up making really long necks and  I had to chop either head or torso (or both) down in order to avoid Pathan giraffes)

Overall I found assembling them a bit of a chore. They felt fragile, a couple of the join points to the sprues weren't that well thought out so some cleaning of flowing robes/folds of turbans was necessary.
And the overall poses just felt a bit awkward. I think I'm spoiled by Perry/GW where it's actually quite hard to make a bad looking model - with quite a few historical plastics I feel like I'm having to work hard to avoid making something awkward. So it took a little while to make five models I'm reasonably happy with.

Here's a couple of comparisons.
Left is an Old Glory

L:R Artizan, WA, Old Glory. The WA is clerly more slended than either of the others, but not a bad match height wise.

And here is the first sprue's worth.

So what do I think?
Overall they're OK.
Not great, but pretty good for bulking out a native force.
I often feel with historical plastics that while I may have got them "cheap" the time it takes to actually glue them together and make them look nice erodes a fair bit of the savings.
I'm not looking forward to sticking them all together, but they'll be just fine alongside my existing metal pathans meaning I can play bigger games - which has to be a good thing.
Of course the real proof comes in the painting, but the detail looks pretty good to me - there's no obvious undercuts or places where scabbards blend in to belts or the like - so I think they'll work well with my spray white, cover in wash "technique".
Of course I'm actually out of white spray so it'll be a while before I can find out.

If you're looking to do big battles on the NWF then they're probably worth getting - but for a skirmish game I'd probably stick with metals.
Also the Perry's are supposed to be working on a plastic pathan set - at which point I rather suspect these will become redundant.