Review: Kibri Marketplace Miltenberg

This kit is too good to be true: five half timbered buildings on a town square with park and fountain for about $50!  That's a lot of plastic for a low price, I jumped at it.

There sure is a lot of stuff in the box, but the first thing I noticed was what's missing: the wood beams. They are all stickers.   Worse still, they are all the same, and they are uncut! This has several implications:

1) It means that there's no relief on the buildings, they all have 2D faces on all sides.

2) It means the buildings cannot be painted, and they are all going to have the identical colour since that's how they were printed.  Ugh!

3) It means I cannot weather the walls, my buildings will all look like pristine toys.

4) Because these stickers were not pre cut, it means I have to carve out every window with a scalpel, which is a very time consuming and fiddily business.  Invariably, some will not be perfect.

However, the sticker problem does not end there.  Each wall has molded window sills protruding under each and every window.  Great.  Each wall sticker has cut lines, illustrating where one must slice to create the window openings.  Great.   Each of these windows is sized exactly tot he window opening, and not the window plus sill: not so good.  This means every stick will either not lay flat, as the sill will protrude underneath and must then be sliced away, or will sit offset by 1-2mm if you lined up the sills with the bottom of the window opening.   In short: the stickers do it fit properly!

So, why do this?  Were they trying to make construction easier?  I doubt it.  The time required to slice up all the many many stickers is immense.  I probably spent 8 hours on them.    Was it to make the kit look better?  Doubt that, as the end result is monochromatic and the fit so poor.  So then it must have been about cost.  But really?  I mean, one or two more frets in a box with this much plastic, how much cost could that add.   This kit is super cheap, and that's appealing, but not when the end result is frustration and a structure you're not keen to display.

That may sound harsh, but the cost cutting does not end there.   There is flash all over the kit.  There are injector pin marks on exposed faces.  Theres seems on exposed faces.  Worst of all, the Sprite attachment points are also on exposed faces on some parts, like the chimneys. The window frame spruce is made of a soft plastic that is not crisply molded.  The window panes are made of a brittle and somewhat opaque semi transparent plastic.  It's really a mess.  Everything one looks to avoid in a plastic kits present here, it's 1960s quality in 2015.  If you read a kit review in fine scale modeller, every single box they will tick as good on a modern kit Kibri has managed to get wrong here.  There's no proper light mask either, just included black paper, if you want to cut your own windows there as well.   The windows?  You get a single sheet full of off scale images of curtains to cut out and use as you like.   The base, while ambitious, has poorly fitting walls that leave it gaps requiring filler to hide, but that's no big deal since you'll be using lots of filler all over this kit.   

So how did it turn out?  Okay.   It was very frustrating and I spent a good 30 hours on it.   I would not recommend it to anyone but a very experinced modeller or someone on an incredibly tight budget, the rest of you will douche better buying quality kits and not being greedy trying to build it all at once.

2/10

 
And here's the real thing, thanks Misha!