Review: Type 89 Chi Ro Medium Sensha Platoon

Battlefront recently release the new Rising Sun briefing for Flames of War.  In Rising Sun, we have been given the long awaited Japanese Forces.  While the Japanese army mostly fielded ground pounding infantry, tanks were also a vital component of the Japanese war machine.  The Japanese fielded a variety of makes and models of tanks including the formidable Type 89 Chi Ro.

The Japanese do not field great tanks and the Type 89 Chi-Ro is not the best tank in the Japanese arsenal, however but it does mount the Type 90 57mm gun.  The Chi Ro is slow and poorly armored, but it mounts your best armored AT option for Japanese tanks in Rising Sun.

The Medium Sensha Platoon box set comes with five Type 89 Chi Ro tanks in a set.  The hull and turret are resin and the rest of the tank is metal.  None of my tanks or bits where broken, bent, missing or otherwise unusable.  One thing that was nice was the set came with enough crewmen to have a commander for each tank.  Of the five commanders there were four different poses, which will allow each of your platoons to have different looking commanders.  There was no bubbling, warping, or miscast, which I sometimes find on resin.

Assembly was fairly straight forward, but more involved than other Battlefront tanks.  The Type 89 Chi Ro has a copula, two MGs, a main gun, commander, two tracks, and this rear piece to attach.  It wasn't terribly difficult to assemble, but took more time than normal to complete.

The only frustrating part of the assembly process was the back bits.  I dont know the official title of that thing, but it were three pieces and they were hard to get right.  I ended up with a lot of glue on my hands and the piece didn't fit flush in the end.

To save time, I primed these tanks desert yellow then painted on swaths of green and red-brown.  I don't like how the yellow line looks on the packaging, so I left that out.  Like most smaller tanks, you can expect to whip these out fairly fast once you have assembled them.

I have very little to gripe about with the neat little Japanese tanks from Battlefront.  Over I am very excited to add them to my collection and field them against my Dads Soviets.  I give them 8 out of 10 California Rolls.  I deducted points because of the extra assembly time.

“Craig Baxter is the Director of the WWPD Northern Research center in Anchorage, AK. When he’s not contributing to WWPD.net and Boltaction.net he is busy blogging, painting, modeling and rolling dice."

The Type 89 Chi-Ro in Flames Of War

Armour  Name  Mobility  Front  Side  Top  Equipment and Notes  Weapon  Range  ROF  Anti-tank  Firepower  Type 89 Chi-Ro Slow Tank 1 1 1 Japanese Turret MG, Hull MG. Type 90 57mm gun 16"/40cm  2 5 4+