Quick Review: Zvezda Pz II

I needed some Pz II's for my DAK force so placed an order with The Plastic Soldier Company for some of their Zvezda snap together kits on Monday. They arrived Thursday morning and I decided to do a quick unboxing.

There's a nice picture on the front of the box, reminiscent of the old action paintings you used to get on Airfix kits.

The back of the box shows shots of the assembled model & the assembly instructions.

The contents are what you would expect. A sprue with five parts to clip out and the instruction sheet. There is also quite a nice stat card allowing the model to be used in a game system called Art of Tactic "Operation Barbarossa 1941" which I'm assuming is a Russian WWII game.

The kit is incredibly easy to assemble. It took me 4 minutes 15 seconds to clip and trim the parts from the sprues and assemble the model. Here's a couple of shots of the assembled model.

The amount of detail isn't bad. From some comments I'd seen about Zvezda kits I wasn't expecting much but I was pleasantly surprised. What did surprise me was how tiny the Pz II was in comparison to the PSC Panthers I'd been doing. I suppose in the back of my mind I'd assumed that most tanks were roughly the same size. Looking at this kit gave me a better appreciation of what it must have been like to bounce around in these 'tiny' tanks at the start of the war and also the increases in tank technology as the war went continued. However the model is not true 1/100 scale. A Pz II was 4.81m long which equates to 48.1mm at 1/100 but the model is only 43.0mm long, well off scale.

So what do I think of the kit? Overall I like it, the only downside I have is that the turret is on very tight so almost impossible to remove to show the tank destroyed and difficult to traverse with it being so small. I imagine that will only get worse once I get paint on the model. I'd give it 7/10 and great value at £2.99 each.