So, some robots? I was planning to do a post about Earthrise wave 2 when I got the Battle Masters from BBTS, but various Generations Selects have been delayed, basically Greasepit is holding everyone up and I’m gonna be getting wave 2 and 3s bits all on top of each other. And I might have the Wave 3 deluxes I was looking for, so sod it here’s what I got since Wave 1 came out – divided into two posts because this shit’s long.
PART 1: the big stuff
Sky Lynx, like many War for Cybertron figures, is the prior version of the character, only more so. I definitely feel like the designers took Combiner Wars Sky Lynx as a template and then just added back in most of the features of the original toy. Helps that this guy is Commander Class and as such has a significantly higher plastic budget than the Voyager Class that had to pull double duty as a combiner’s torso.
As such, if you buy into Sky Lynx’s whole thing – the shuttle that transforms into a bird with a breeze block underneath that transforms into a big cat, and can do a combined birdcat mode – this is really good. Transformation is simple, but it doesn’t need to be complex, It’s one of those cases where adding complexity would be detrimental to the toy. This is two beefy lumps of plastic that do some stuff together, and it’s pretty good
In terms of poseability, it’s a mixed bag – there’s plenty of articulation on display, more than you’d expect probably, but it doesn’t always work out. The shuttle/bird has these two long, spindly legs and there’s ratchet joints in the hips, knees and ankles that help keep them solid – but there are rotational joints just behind the hip ratchets and ankle tilts as well, meaning that there are points that will just make the legs splay out to the sides. The long neck and head also give the bird mode a weird centre of gravity to boot. Similarly, the wings have ratchet joints at the point they meet the body, but there’s a hinge joint behind that which can’t really support the weight of the wings and will sag if you don’t get it just right. And on top of that, there’s a mushroom peg-based joint right behind the hinge that allows for wing-flapping motion and posing, but it means the wing has a tendency to pop off. And while the tail is segmented it’s all in the interest of collapsing the whole thing into the back of the shuttle mode, so there’s no side to side motion. All that said, the neck is fantastic, it slides out from the body with a length you kinda don’t expect and has tons of articulation.
The Lynx mode fares better, thanks to being a bit simpler. The legs have mushroom joints for rotational poseability, and their positioning and the way you twist them makes it very easy to pop them off too, especially if you’re transforming to base mode. But the head is really cool again, with these huge imposing fangs.
Combined robot mode is very much a best of both worlds situation and is stable, poseable and looks great. You do still need to worry about the loose wing joints, but eh. There’s a base mode too, but like most base modes it’s really just some robot bits splayed out that they claim is a launch gantry, and it looks OK. But with the whole AIRLOCK play pattern I have a ton of other base mode bits and ramps that connect up and it is fun to link them all together, especially when I can have Astrotrian and Sky Lynx on their respective launch gantries. Of course, I only have two Micromasters so it looks a bit sparse, but c’est la guerre.
There’s a bunch of little fun bits as well – like both heads have opening mouths with a gun barrel on the tongue that you can connect blast effects to and emulate Sky Lynx breathing fire like in the cartoon. He also comes with 6 blast effects. Basically the same as came with Omega Supreme, but in orange plastic rather than the orange and cloudy black of Omega’s. Also instead of the same three stackable pieces in there twice each, you get one of the base pieces, two of the middle ones, and three of the tips.Presumably this is so you can use the three tips as exhaust effects in the shuttle engines. the only other accessories in the set are a pair of losenge things that can be used as boosters,sensors or weapons depending on the mode and how you’re feeling.
Overall Sky Lynx is a more solid and accomplished figure than Jetfire, I think. Being about 15 quid cheaper helps too, and I feel sub-$100 is a better place for the Commander Class to be. Definitely down for more figures in this size in the future.
Doubledealer is a Transformer I actually got as a kid, so I had some tactile and emotional connection to the physical item rather than just the character from the fiction. And he’s mostly good, but has some flaws.
On the good side, he’s much closer to the platonic ideal of a leader-class Transformer than the STE GE and other Earthrise Leaders – a much bigger figure than the Voyager-sized bots with big accessories we’ve seen over the last couple of years. And like Astrotrain this is a better Triple-changer than the Titans Return ones in terms of having distinct modes. There’s still a ton of accessories in the box – this time a big cruise missile that splits into two weapons like the original, a pair of flare/grenade launchers, a sensor pod and a pintle-mount gun, and a big blast shield with stabilisers to give the missile launcher mode a sense of verisimilitude when posed to look like the… missile is… launching. (Jokes aside, stick a blast effect in the back of the missile and you can make for a cool in the midst of launching scene). There’s no Powermaster partners in the set, but they are in that one Generations Selects set I have on the way.
Robot mode is a big chunky boy, with a lot of heft to him. He looks really cool and in a very nice touch his Autobot insignia are on panels that can be flipped around to reveal Decepticon ones, and there’s tons of spaces to mount his gear. And that’s where the first problem hits – that big blast panel is meant to clip into a tab on his back, which is used to mount the missile in vehicle mode. But if you mount it the way they suggest it sticks right out and ruins Doubledealer’s silhouette. You can get it flush to the back with some effort though. It does mean that if you mount the missile tip on the outer shoulder port as the instructions suggest, you can’t really raise the arm, but it fits on a port closer to the head and it looks better there anyway IMO. The other weapon-related gripe is that on the original toy, the missile split into a long shoulder-mounted missile and a short hand-mounted gun. But this time the missile is shorter and the gun is massive – and the arm has two elbow joints for transformation, and the upper one of the two is a more natural-looking articulation point but is too loose to support the weight of the gun. So you need to bend the ratcheted lower joint and finesse it a bit to look good.
Bird mode is very similar to the G1 version, There’s not a huge amount to talk about, there’s some articulation in the wings, not much in the legs. The blast plate from the missile truck mode fits onto the back here, in an approximation of tail feathers and you’re meant to mount the missile up there, but it can be very easy for the plate to pop off, and the missile doesn’t fit on brilliantly. You can mount the missile underneath the body like the G1 version.
Overall this is a good update of a G1 oddity, and it works pretty good. For all the engineering issues and poseability weirdness he looks really good, has a cool vehicle mode and two decent other modes and has some cool little features.
Snapdragon is a companion to STE GE’s Apeface, finishing off the Horrorcons. And he’s a vast improvement over his teammate. Jet mode is this SR-71 looking thing that’s more defined as an aircraft than Apeface’s brick with outcroppings, the cockpit space for… (checks TFWiki)… Krunk is really nice – two panels open out sideways to provide access, and there’s some painted details on the control panel. One of the panels on my figure is really stiff, but it doesn’t feel like it’ll break any time soon.
Dino mode has a nice, interesting but simple transformation from jet the back half of the jet mode is two panels that are clipped together around a central core, and you unclip them and reposition them, and fold out a neck piece to create the narrow, broad, narrow silhouette of the dino mode, and also reveal the teeny arms. Krunk can be hard to fit into the dino head piece, but if you rotate the head around it goes in better, and there are empty panels in the headpiece that can be filled if you move Krunk’s arms into place.
Robot mode is another good one, big and solid and beefy and holds a pose very well. He also has waist articulation that Apeface is missing. And none of that weird nylon either! He does look very good paired up with Apeface though.
The Quintesson Judge is quite an oddity. It’s… well… an accurate rendition of the Quintesson from the cartoons and comics, and as such it’s less a transforming robot toy than it is an egg with faces and tentacles… and what can charitably be described as an alternate mode. The big gimmick is that the Judge has all five Quintesson faces, and there’s a little lever-driven rotation feature that doesn’t quite flip through from one face to the next, but it’s kinda cool. Also, a couple of the faces have opening and closing mouths, so that’s a thing. Aside from that, each tentacle is on a hinge joint, and is made of softer plastic that can be bent into different poses. Each tentacle has a 3mm post on the tip and another to the side, allowing for the attachment of blast effects and weapons with small enough ports – and there are ports around the base of the figure that you can clip the tentacles into to keep them out of the way, primarily for “transformation”.
Accessory-wise there are three items in the box – a chair, a clear plastic effect that clips onto the underside of the Quintesson to emulate the pillar of energy they float on (this was orange in preview pictures, but colourless here) a gun that’s modelled after the welding torch a scientist uses to repair Optimus Prime in the cartoon. It has a 5mm post so any bot can hold it, and a 3mm port on the side to connect it to any of the Quintesson’s tentacles
And so, transformation. This is certainly a thing. Step 1 is to remove the top of the head, which reveals a cage pegged into the head. First, secure the tentacles to the ports at the bottom of the body. Next, line up the faces against a specific mark on the body, they’re all mounted on hinge joints that are now folded upwards, and reveal five hinged panels underneath that fold downwards – one of these is a ramp to a small internal space and has an AIRLOCK clip on the end. Unclip the energy effect from underneath the Judge’s body, and then peg it into the top of the head… which is balanced on top of the folded-upwards faces but there’s no way to secure it. Unfold the chair so it’s a flat panel, it also has an AIRLOCK clip on one side. The instructions say to clip the chair/panel.to the ramp, and then secure the cage to one of the pegs on it, but it also says to put the blaster into one of the 5mm ports on the cage – and you can’t do both because the cage only has 5mm ports on one side. And the end result is pretty stupid looking, even by the standards of the Transformer Base Mode. I honestly don’t see myself transforming this very often, except for bemusement or to illustrate it to others. I could see myself using the chair in panel form and the cage as bits in a display if I’m using other AIRLOCK bits, and that’s about it.
Overall the toy is OK, but it’s a stretch to say it’s really worth the 30 quid I paid. I don’t feel ripped off because it’s a Quintesson toy and how often are we gonna get one of those, but even so, one for collectors or wait for a discount.
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