Transformers: Combiner Wars: Cyclonus

Cyclonus is a retool of the Combiner Wars Silverbolt, and is the torso of a teamless gestalt called Galvatronus. Apparently, Galvatronus is going to be the nemesis of the upcoming Victorion ‘fan built’ combiner.The sorta-story for Galvatronus is that he can use mind control powers to force other Cybertronians to merge with him, so he can produce a team out of pretty much anyone.

I don’t like that. I’d prefer he had a dedicated team. So, I don’t have much of an interest in Galvatronus, which is ok, because Cyclonus by himself is a nice figure.

Widely regarded to be the best of the Combiner Wars torsos, although already reaching oversaturation with the recent announcement of the Botcon 2016 box set torso being the forthcoming Scattershot version of this mold, Cyclonus sports a number of differences from the base Silverbolt figure. The entire nose of the aircraft is new, as are the wings, and if you take just those things, this figure bears a close resemblance to Cyclonus from the 1986 movie without being overly thin like the 2009 (?) Classics Deluxe figure’s jet mode is. The trademark forward swept wings allow the jet to look sleek and fast despite having the big, blocky robot claves hanging beneath the rear end. That’s something that’s kind of an issue for me with this mold in general, the large leg parts that, from certain angles, kill the illusion of a slim aircraft. It’s essentially the jet-Transformer problem: practically all Transformers with jet alt modes are essentially an aircraft laying down on top of a folded robot, but some figures do this better than others. Because the robot legs are so big on this figure, the illusion of the jet form is pretty broken, although from some angles it’s not quite so bad, and I think Cyclonus works this best between he and Silverbolt, probably due to the nice, rich purple color scheme of this toy. 

 

He is really purple. That was thing that sold me on buying him. The first time I’d spotted a Cyclonus in the wild was actually in the KaDeWe in Berlin this August when we were on our honeymoon. I was amazed at how strikingly purple he was. The rest of his coloration is pretty minimal, really: silver legs and hands, a darker purple on the shoulders, some black and/or grey here and there. His gun is just grey plastic, like his upper arms are, and that all looks a bit cheap. I think it’d look a lot better had those parts been silver like the hands and thighs.

This figure has a great new head sculpt as well. It’s very G1, while also taking some cues from the IDW More Than Meets the Eye Cyclonus. He also comes with these small canard wing pieces that stick on the forearms so that, in jet mode, he has some kind of stabilizers in the rear end of the aircraft since it lacks a tailfin. In robot mode they can stay on the forearms, but I mount the insanely long gun on the arm, and he looks kinda goofy with only one forearm wing blade thing. Fortunately, they can be plugged in to holes on the underside of the jet nose, giving Cyclonus a pair of back blades. It looks cool. 

Again, I’m not interested in the combined mode for this figure, although just this afternoon I found myself starting to rationalize a purchase of the Optimus Maximus repaint team by thinking “Well, I do have Cyclonus . . .” and I think I am starting to want that Sunstreaker repaint. Cyclonus by himself is a nice, albeit slightly random, repaint with enough new pieces to make him look and honestly feel different from Silverbolt. He does have an issue tabbing together, as in jet mode the wings and all their tabs don’t always peg together in the most solid of ways. As a result of this, wings often pop up from a flush state against the robot legs, and the thinness of the wing plastic makes pegging and unpegging them a little bit frightening. As for any future Galvatronus interest, I think I need to see where Combiner Wars goes as a line, which may not be much farther. The Combaticons are coming, as is a Sky Lynx and random set of Autobot repaint limbs v.2, and after that, we don’t really know. I’m not sure why we’d get a Scattershot without Technobot team, but that may just not be fully revealed yet. There’s been talk on the various message boards that some Sweeps team would be cool, seeing Galvatronus and all, but I don’t really even know who would be a part of this group.

Regardless, as a standalone figure, this is a nice one. Visually pleasant and fun to play around with, I feel like I’ve gotten a better appreciation of this figure by not feeling the compulsion to combine him with any limbs, and, much like the combiner torsos of G1, but for pretty different reasons, Cyclonus doesn’t lose anything in play value by not combing him with any one. In other words, another solid entry in the Combiner Wars line up.