The 8.8 cm Flak 18/36/37/41 is one of the most famous guns of World War II, and has been the subject of many model kits over the years. As a result modellers have a good choice of such models to choose from, so perhaps for this reason Fujimi decided to provide a skeleton crew to add value and a bit of life to their offering. As always the gun itself is not our concern here, but the gun crew are, and all six figures are pictured above.

In all honesty you hardly need us to tell you what the pictures already have - these figures are pretty horrible. Each comes in several parts - the man with binoculars has seven - and the fit is really poor. There seems to have been no real effort to match the arm with the shoulder in a seamless way, so the resulting figures are horribly disjointed. Even without that issue the figures are quite poor sculpts, with crude detail and very ugly proportions. Added to that there is a huge amount of flash almost everywhere, plus mould marks and sink holes, and some really noticeable issues with mismatch between moulds leading to bad interruptions in the lines on the figures. Even relatively simple and widely familiar objects like the helmets have been realty badly done here, so these figures are some of the worst we have seen in hard plastic.

The poses in themselves are not too bad, although given the size of the 88 we were surprised to see half the poses kneeling. With separate arms there is some scope for variety, but essentially most of the poses seem to be carrying ammunition, which is no bad thing. Certainly the appealing box artwork gives no indication of the poses inside, which is a shame. Apart from the four poses with empty hands (which could only really be holding a shell since, as the box tells us, operating the gun requires sitting), there is a kneeling man using binoculars and an officer wearing a cap. What is obviously missing is someone operating the gun, which is certainly an opportunity missed since that is surely the most obvious pose to provide.

The men seem to wear field tunics with belts and 'Y' straps, plus rifle ammunition pouches and an entrenching tool. Strangely that is the limit of the kit (apart from a couple who have pouches in the small of their back), so no water bottle or anything else. The entrenching tool is a strange choice, though these are all separate so can be omitted if preferred. The men also wear long boots, but nothing here is well done so while the choices are strange the basic historical accuracy is almost secondary.

The set is advertised as 1/76 scale, but even at that scale the figures are very small. With more modern sets now offering far better gun crews, there really is no reason to go to the trouble of purchasing and assembling these very poor figures.