Sergeants, whether part of the Teutonic Order or not, were just below knights in the social order but would have only slightly less impressive armour and weaponry, and many would be indistinguishable from many knights. Nevertheless in the medieval world social position was everything, and sergeants generally aspired to one day join the ranks of the knights themselves. As with the knights, they would generally be mounted, but of course circumstances sometimes dictated that they fight on foot, and so we find this set of foot sergeants from Mars, adding to their range of Teutonic fighters as they might have appeared at the historic battle of Tannenberg in 1410.

Most of our pictures of figures are done to a set scale, and for the width of image we generally find we can fit five figures. Not here, and there are several reasons for that. The first might be that warriors with edged weapons generally take up much more room than those with firearms, but as you can see no one here has a weapon. However the poses are odd - really odd. Why do so many of them have their legs so far apart? Having a solid base from which to deliver a blow is one thing, but for some reason there are a great many such poses here. Even given that no one has a weapon, some of the poses still look ungainly, and it is not easy to imagine what weapon would best be placed in the cupped hands. The back of the box gives some suggestions, but even there some of the poses look far from natural. Also there has been some cheating by the photographer - the second figure in the top row is shown holding an axe, but as can be seen this would look ridiculous on the actual figure, who seems to hold some wide-diameter pole with both hands. Some of the poses look balletic - the first two in the bottom row could easily be warming up for a performance of Swan Lake, and are utterly unconvincing as fighting men.

But enough of the bad poses, for there is another, even more serious problem; these figures are not 1/72 scale. As you can see, the reason we can only get four on a line is because they are enormous - averaging 28mm in height, and as always that is just from sole of foot to top of head, regardless of any headwear. This makes everyone over 2 metres in height, which is six feet seven inches in old imperial measurement - a height that would be considered medically exceptional even today and completely freakish in the 15th century. Yet the figures do not seem unduly tall, so all the proportions are in keeping with this height, meaning they tower over other sets that are genuinely 1/72 in scale.

Sculpting is pretty poor, despite a fair amount of detail. Some items have no detail at all, and others have a very peculiar shape which is anything but natural. The faces will give small children nightmares and curdle milk with ease, but the killer blow is the amount of flash on these men, which is quite considerable. No, actually the killer blow is the amount of flash on the weapons (for which see image of the sprue), for they are almost entirely flash. This lump of plastic has been described before on these pages, and then we said it was a slab with some weapons etched on it, suggesting it would be a brave individual who would undertake to rescue the 'pieces' from this. The same applies here; it would be a tremendous effort little short of carving it yourself out of virgin plastic. We cannot imagine why you would bother.

The general accuracy of the costumes looks reasonable, given the vagueness of some of the sculpting. The men wear an assortment of bits of armour, most of which we can accept in view of the diverse origins of many of these men, although the overall look would be more German than anything else. One man has a full-face helmet with a sort of cone on top the like of which we have never seen before, but otherwise we have no particular complaints.

So we have giant figures that are completely useless if displayed next to any genuine 1/72 scale figure, are badly sculpted with some bizarre poses and effectively no weapons worthy of the name but a good deal of flash. It’s pretty hard to rescue anything much from a set like that, and in our view you shouldn’t bother.