) although I do recall some plastic vehicles that were ready made that included a Scorpion and a Bedford lorry...Anyway, on to the kit. The box art depicts a Cromwell in action in winter and looks suitably dramatic as you'd expect from Adam Tooby. The box is the usual top opening type used for Airfix' larger kits, with a glossy lid and sturdy bottom tray.
Inside the box there is the instruction booklet, a small decal sheet, a small fret of PE, one set of poly-caps, a set of vinyl tracks and nine sprues of styrene parts (2 on a very dark grey, the rest in a tan coloured plastic).
The instructions at first glance seem to be the usual Airfix produced fare, but the illustrations are slightly different from recent instruction manuals and are also printed in grey-scale only rather than the customary grey with red & green aspects. This might just be indicative that the illustrations are directly taken from CAD designs, or that they've been subcontracted along with the moulding...
Irrespective of this, the illustrations appear clear enough and show whatever options are available as you go along. The options mainly concern having hatches open (there is no interior whatsoever) and turret stowage depending on the choice of the two provided schemes you decide upon. The other significant option concerns the tracks, for which you can choose between the vinyl one-piece type, or styrene link-and-length parts. Both look to be nicely detailed, and will take washes and mud nicely.
The PE provides a grill for the exhaust and some thin strips to add to the hull.
The decals look fine, I suspect from the oriental script on the reverse that they are not Italian (or European in general) in origin, but they look fine to me and provide unit insignia and vehicle 'registration' numbers.
The rest of the box is taken up with the plastic parts, all of which are nicely moulded without a hint of flash to be seen. Ejector pin marks look to all be on internal or hidden surfaces so should not be a problem. Interestingly, Airfix have chosen to go for multi-part assemblies for both the hull and turret rather than one-piece units, possibly for tooling cost savings but I quite like the idea except that ensuring that all the parts are square might be tricky.
Overall, a good looking kit for the money and I'm sure it will look great assembled. Does it need an interior, or a crew? Certainly costs would go up significantly if both were provided, but given that tank hatches are generally fairly constricted then the lack of an interior is no great loss to me. There are plenty of suppliers for crew figures, who have done the hard work of getting the sculpting done, and of course have factored in the associated costs so I see little point in Airfix duplicating the work and costs involved and making the kit more expensive...
Review sample courtesy of my wallet (and selling a couple of other kits
), and supplied by the good folks at Tiger Hobbies 
