Transformers: Combiner Wars: The Stunticons: Offroad and Dead End

Offroad:

                Each of the teams is getting a new member in the Combiner Wars line, and for the Stunticons, Offroad is the new guy, replacing Wildrider. It does look like the left out original members will be made available though, as Wildrider and Slingshot for the Arialbots have already been made available for online purchase. As of this writing, I’m waiting on confirmation for my order for both of them. More on that later though. For now, let’s look at Offroad.

                Offroad is a pickup truck, which is an odd addition to a team of sports cars. I’m not really keeping up with the comics at this time, so I’m not sure what his persona is or anything like that. I will read them in the near future, but work and my recent wedding have kept me busy.

                Offroad is grey and teal with some red accents. He also wears the hood of his vehicle mode as a backpack, and it is a very large backpack. It sits far enough behind his head that it’s not much of a hindrance to the figure, but it gets in the way of his shoulder panels/truck doors which does inhibit posability to a degree. I don’t mind too much, but I do see how it could be something that diminishes the figure for some people. His lime green face shows off a creepy robot grin, and his face does have a maniacal tone to it that quite honestly is befitting a member of a group of paranoids and lunatics such as the Stunticons. While his truck mode doesn’t really say ‘member of a reckless driving group of shock troopers,’ his grimace totally does say ‘guy you don’t want to be near in combat because you can’t be sure what he’s going to do.’ Again, like most of the Deluxes in the line, good posability, but hampered by the shoulder panels, which give Offroad a nice profile and a cool silhouette in robot mode.

                Truck mode is nice, and it is a sporty looking truck, but it still doesn’t really fit in with a group of race cars. At first glance, he doesn’t look like a Stunticon to me, and there’s been plenty of drivel on the Internet to this point about people being stuck in the past or the ever vapid GeeWun screeching and finger pointing, and I for one am ok with the new team members Combiner Wars is bringing us. Like I said, I’m waiting on confirmation of a Wildrider and Slingshot order, but I’m still ok with the new guys. And I like Offroad a lot; he was the one Stunticon that I was really enthusiastic about getting, mainly because he was a new figure and not ‘just another car.’ Anyway, Offroad is a good looking truck, the grey body and red windows making for a nice combo.

                As for his weapon, I finally have something good to say. Offroad comes with a purple handled ax, and it’s the first Stunticon weapon that looks cool in the robots’ hand. His combiner hand foot part looks like it is intended to be a four pipe exhaust set up but like Dragstrip it doesn’t peg on anywhere that makes it look good.
**Actually, I just figured this out. You can snap Offroads' hand foot piece into the bed of his truck mode, and it looks either like he's carrying a large load of cargo, or a large bed-mounted engine, depending on what you see it as. It works real well, like Breakdowns' does. **

                Offroad is a real winner for me. He’d be the best of the group if it wasn’t for the last guy….

Dead End: 

                Dead End is the best of the bunch. While it is fairly legit to say that the individual members of combiner teams are fairly forgettable and not long on personas, there usually is one that becomes more of a personality than the rest; the one that you remember because quite frankly they’re the only ones that were memorable, generally exposed through brief lines of very self-identifying dialogue in a cartoon or comic. For the Stunticons, and for me, that one memorable persona is Dead End, the fatalistic, leave-a-good-looking-corpse nihilist. The figure is a great figure, with some very strong colors true to the original, a nice, solid maroon with grey and gold accents. This is one very good looking toy.  He also sports the chest piece that covers a good amount of the combiner connection, which really is a good design element. I do kind of wish they would have included such a part on as many of the figures as they could: Offroad for instance could have fit one under the truck hood and it may have made him that much better of a figure.

                Vehicle mode for Dead End is nice as well. The car mode is very sleek, and very rounded along the edges. I don’t know anything about cars, so I’m not certain if this is an actual car design, but it reminds of the Bughatti Veyron that appears to be a required alt mode for someone in every Transformers line post 2008. The bib piece in robot mode folds underneath his car hood in vehicle mode, hiding his head and making it so that he’s not just staring at the ground beneath him when he’s driving.

                His weapon is a pipe. Oh, if only it plugged in on the underside of the car mode it would be perfect but once more, Combiner Wars Stunticon weapons aren’t exactly that functional. His hand foot weapon is some kind of quasi-three barreled weapon.

                Overall Dead End is the best of the Stunticons. He looks good and striking in all modes, and all modes look good. Breakdown is a nice car but somewhat lacking as a robot; Dragstrip is decent in both but not really anything spectacular, and basically the same goes for Motormaster; Blackjack has a fun little robot mode but a bland car mode; Offroad is great in both modes, but lacks that chest piece that Dead End has which pushes him to the top. This is the figure that is getting redone as Streetwise and also for the *confirmed as of this writing to be in transit* exclusive Wildrider, which is terrific news. This is a good figure all around, and getting another one is going to be a good thing.

Next up, a thought on the team as a whole and Menasor. 

Transformers Combiner Wars: The Stunticons: Breakdown and Dragstrip

Breakdown:

                Breakdown is a strange robot. His hips are ball joints that are on this scissor type construction; I’m not sure what its official name is. It’s the kind of joint that lets the legs compress closer to the body in robot mode, but extend further away from the body to lengthen the car mode. The overall result of this is that I’m not entirely sure how his legs are supposed to look in robot mode. The way I’ve got him, he seems a little squat, but this places the legs basically in line with the shoulders, giving him a wide waist. Out of all the Stunticons, Breakdown is the ‘meh’ one, not being very exciting in most categories despite not being necessarily bad at anything. I think if he does have a real flaw, it is the hip construction. I do think though that once I find a way to situate them that I like, he’ll look better. As of this writing, I’ve owned him for less than a week and am fiddling with him for the third time while I write about him. His legs are big and boxy, and he is wearing his car mode hood on his back. The head sculpt is right on with the original, which is awesome. His blue and off white paint job is very nice despite, like Motormaster, being real minimal. Something that Breakdown, and later on Dead End, does that sets him apart from pretty much all the Combiner Wars Deluxes is that he has a chest piece, basically a bib, that folds down to partially cover the combiner connection that flips out of his robot chest. Most of the other Deluxes all simple have their combiner pegs visible – really visible – directly in their centers, and it is a nice touch to have one or two of them where the peg is covered up, if only to break up the general sameness of appearance that really does come with these teams: after all, the Deluxes, while all different, have to be essentially the same in design so as to facilitate the Scramble City-style modularity of the line.

                The vehicle mode is really nice. Breakdown is a very sleek sportscar, just like his G1 figure, with a punch of red paint on the hood to break up the all off white of the rest of the body. We have had numerous versions of this car over the years, that Lamborghini that was on so many Trapper Keepers in the 80s. Probably the best version of it in my opinion has been the Classics Sunstreaker/Sideswipe figure, but the Breakdown one is more angular and cuts sharper lines, as opposed to that Classics figures more rounded appearance. I hate to say “it’s that car again” and leave it at that, but there isn’t much else to say about it really.

                His weapon some kind of rifle/sword thing, and some people are all excited that it’s a gunblade from Final Fantasy VIII. It works better as a sword than a rifle, but it’s not a great weapon in either form. None of the Stunticon weapons are very good, to be honest. The combiner hand foot has two open exhaust port looking things, and you can mount it in vehicle mode like exhaust vents, and it actually doesn’t look like a folded up thing stuck to a car, the way most of these accessories end up looking.

               

Dragstrip:

                Dragstrip is the one I’ve had the longest. I picked up the Wave 1 Deluxes in early February I think, and then waited and waited and waited to find Wave 2, which I just got the last of about a week ago. Dragstrip is pretty lanky, with thin thighs and angular shoulders and calves. It’s a fairly slender overall look that works well for a robot that transforms into a Formula One racer, and the front end of the car does a neat thing in transformation where it flips around to peg in to the back of the figure, leaving the front wheels right behind the robot shoulders, and this look gives the figure a feeling of depth, making the upper body feel much meatier than the legs. Yellow and maroon are the main colors, or perhaps the only colors would be more fitting. Aside from the black of the tires and the silver struts and engine details, Dragstrip is essentially two tone. He does have a new head, nothing like his original appearance, but the face sculpt is a sinister looking one with the darker maroon paint of his visor having two tear-like tails, and some people have likened it to tears of blood. I won’t that melodramatic about it, but it is a mean look.

                In vehicle mode, Dragstrip is once again an open wheel race car, four wheels down from his G1 bizarre six. Unlike Breakdown, there aren’t any newly revealed colors on Dragstrip’s car mode, the yellow and maroon remaining fairly unbroken. He is a nice looking car, a very slender car, as is telegraphed by his robot mode.

                Overall, Dragstrip is a simple but deceptive toy. Slight in both modes, color consistent in both modes, and fairly basic in both modes, he nevertheless is an impressive figure for his new head and general posability. While he is no more jointed than any of the other Combiner Wars Deluxes, Dragstrip can get some neat poses going because of the overall slender nature of the figure.

                His weapon is some kind of sword thing. There are no good places to stick the weapons in vehicle mode.

Transformers Combiner Wars: The Stunticons: general thoughts, Motormaster and Blackjack

So to kick things off for the blog, I wanted to do a review of the Stunticons from the current Transformers: Combiner Wars line. I'm hoping to add more pictures as I go along. Right now, things are in their infancy here at the Coffin (lol), and I felt it would be best to get myself writing and make things prettier once I got some traction. So, without any further ado, here we go.

In general, the Combiner Wars Deluxes are all pretty good looking figures. Except for a few relatively minor alterations, things like new or different heads or faces, the figures look like the G1 characters that they are supposed to be modernizations of. That’s fairly important, as if these are supposed to be “Classics”-style updates of the G1 combiner teams, looking like the G1 characters works in their favor. Something that would stand as a welcome contrast to other combining team figures reaching back to the Unicron Trilogy era, particularly the Energon combiners. Just naming an airplane Skydive is not the same thing as having a figure of Skydive, regardless of what people say when they want to make it seem like this is some kind of overly neckbeardish thing. Characters do not always have to be visually the same as they were in 1985, but nameslaps do not actually make toys into characters, regardless of the tears of apologists.

All the Deluxe figures are pretty posable, really only lacking joints where the joints aren’t exactly feasible. They have no wrist or ankle joints but still manage a real range of movement and posability.

Motormaster:

                Motormaster is pretty nice. From pictures and even holding the box in hand, Motormaster looks like a robot that turns into a truck, and neither thing is particularly inspired. In hand though, Motormaster is fun. He’s an imposing robot, with a comically small head and pretty stupid weapons. But he looks good. He looks big and tough, the way the character has always been styled. Motormaster is supposed to be the mean and manipulative leader of the Stunticons, using fear and intimidation to keep his crew in line, and this figure gives that vibe. The things that make the CW Prime look dumb to me (even though I don’t own one) make Motormaster a success. The head is a little small taken on its own, but if you look at the figure as a whole, it works.

                Truck mode wise, he’s ok. Not anything terribly special, looks like it takes some cues from AoE Galvatron’s truck mode, and it works well. The colors are a lot less bland than I’d initially thought they were. Motormaster is primarily grey with black, and in robot mode he at least has his big black chest piece to break up a whole lot of grey. In truck mode his windows are this light purple, and despite being such a minimal touch of color it pops pretty well; along with some darker purple lines on his side panels, there is a less is more approach to paint going on here, and it works nicely for me. I’ve read a lot of people who dislike that, and they say he’s too bland. Yeah, a bit, but at times I think the look works better than it should.

                Torso mode is pretty bad, and in the standard configuration Menasor looks squat and dopey. Straightening out the legs though…..much better.

                Weapons are a small and silly looking sword and a ‘gun’ that combine into Menasor’s sword, and combined it’s fairly menacing looking. Individually, they look lame.

Blackjack:

                The Combiner Wars line is trying to integrate Legends sized figures into the gestalt modes of the combined teams. While this is a neat idea, it is certainly not going to work well all the time. The Aerialbots are adding Powerglide as a gun, and the Stunticons add Blackjack, a small black car, as a chest piece for Menasor. It is supposed to be an armor upgrade reminiscent of the Motormaster accessory that formed Menasor’s chest in the G1 iteration, but in practice, it just looks like Menasor stuck a car to his chest.

                As a standalone toy, Blackjack is cool. He’s got some good posability and everything, and his transformation is pretty interesting, as the top of the car more or less flips over the entire length of the robot body, essentially elongating the robot into a car. It’s neat. Blackjack is neat, but mainly as a stand alone figure. In combined Menasor mode, Blackjack looks like he belongs on Menasor, and truthfully the super robot looks a bit naked without the little guy. Vehicle mode is basically a car that you’d expect to find in the Legends line. For the most part, Blackjack is a nice figure and he is fun to transform back and forth, but the integration part works better thus far with figures that turn into weapons. Powerglide and Bombshell, who also has a gun mode, are much more interesting additions to the teams, where Blackjack just looks like something that should be a part of Menasor in the first place, thus not bringing any sense of addition or bonus to his inclusion.