M3A2 Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicle

The Forces of Valor line is never short on weathering. The Bradley just looks like it has been brushed down with a wash of black paint. The plus side to this is that it brings out all the details that might get lost on first glance, like the rivets. They are everywhere and when they are highlighted the vehicle just seems to come to life. But, in other areas, the wash builds up on places you wouldn’t expect like in the middle of some random side panels. This isn’t totally bad, but i would liked to have seen a brown wash or a dark tan wash used for instances like that to look like sand or dirt build up. Something is better than nothing i suppose, and Unimax executes the paint scheme well despite a few little hiccups.

One of the best places the wash is used is on the engine grill. It seems like the whole area was given a couple coats of the black wash and the elevated grill was wiped down so that the wash stayed within the grill slats. The execution looks really nice and makes the whole area look grimy and dirty.

Unimax seems to cover their vehicles in all sorts of various paints that make the vehicle feel dirty. This is a good thing, but sometimes it seems a bit sloppy. On one side the vehicle needs to be dirty, there really isn’t a pattern to dirt, so to speak, but it does tend to only go where there is direct where of the vehicle. The vehicle has some simple stowage mounted on the top of the base of the vehicle and on the back of the troop access door. These elements are painted correctly and help add some visual interest to the piece.

The one missing paint app is the periscope glass on all the crew hatches. This seems a bit sloppy given all the details Unimax put into the exterior of this vehicle, but anyone can go get a bottle of dark blue paint and fix this problem. Perhaps they are all in the closed position? I think that the blue would have broken up the immense amount of tan and give the the eye something else to focus on.

The Bradley is not just visually appealing. The hull is beefy and substantial, it really feels like a heavy duty armored vehicle. You know that if your young kid got this and tossed it off the second story balcony you could be confident in the fact that it would survive, intact no less. That is why Unimax’s duarability reigns supreme.

The tracks are a long piece of rubber joined together around the plastic road wheels. The suspension itself is molded on to the base and each has a hole in the center that contains a metal pin that holds the road wheels on to the vehicle and allows the wheels to roll and the tracks to spin.

The base of the vehicle is completely undetailed and has holes all over the bottom so that screws can join the bottom of the base to the top. There are also smaller holes that were used to teather the bradley to the bottom of the vehicle using small plastic covered wire ties.

The one thing that will disappoint all owners of this vehicle is the non-functional tow missile launcher. What’s a Tow launcher? See that big box on the left side of the turret? That’s a tow launcher, not just some cool box. In reality, that box contains two anti tank missiles and can be fired on any heavy armor that can’t be chewed up by the ferocious bushmaster chain gun. The toy’s tow system doesn’t move at all, it just sits, statically in the inactive position. Boring. I’m not expecting missiles to come out, but I would have liked to have seen the launcher flip up to the firing position.