Transformers: Fall of Cybertron Combaticons

Yeah bro, I love combining robots, they're so . . . AAAHHHH!!!!

Early in January, interesting news began to pop up regarding future Combiner Wars releases. Images, incomplete and unofficial at first, began appearing that seemed to be showing parts of two new combiner figures, Computron and Liokaiser. The Technobots have been a terribly kept secret, as there is a Scattershot figure coming to mass retail, and one of the Botcon toys for 2016 is Brawl with a drill. Really, only Hasbro brand hyper loyalists, the kind that religiously repeat mantras of Hasbro being some infallible entity, denied the eventuality of Computron, mainly because a year ago Hasbro said they weren’t planning one right now, which, in Hasbro sycophant, translates into ‘guaranteed, never, ever ever.’ 

Liokaiser is a surprise, the Japanese only gestalt that lots of fans love having zero American presence whatsoever. The leaked photos of box art got me ramblin’ at the wife again, this time about the interesting elements the original Liokaiser figures introduced to the world of transforming, merging robots. Things like the integrated hands and feet, elements that are always bemoaned by fans and collectors for having not been included in other combining figures, Combiner Wars included. People often cry out, “Liokasier has integrated hands; why can’t Hasbro do that? It was possible in the late 80’s; why not in 20**?” 

Hasbro did try it once. It was Fall of Cybertron Bruticus.

Clearly the most ambitious figures of the Fall of Cybertron line were the Combaticons, and their combined form of Bruticus. This was to be the first combiner toy following the bizarre and generally disliked Power Core Combiners line, which hadn’t really worked out as well as it sh/could have. But, that’s another story for another time. Prior to Power Core, the live action Devastator was the most recent combiner, and before that, the Unicron Trilogy featured a lot of combine-ing, but only Energon had actual combiners. FoC Bruticus was greeted with optimism, but almost as soon as pictures began to surface, that optimism faded. 

Oh boy. 

I almost don’t know where to start. 

Each of the five Combaticons are Deluxe class figures that follow the Scramble City format of serving as either arm or leg, save for the torso figure. They all sport Cybertronian alt modes, which has always been a faster way of saying ‘approximate some Earth vehicle, but don’t worry about actually looking good at all.’ Each of them has some pretty serious issues, and in true gestalt fashion, those issues contribute to the total mess that is Bruticus. 

When I grow up, I might be a decent torso.

The Deluxe size doesn’t really hurt anything, with the exception of Onslaught: as a torso, Onslaught is too small, throwing off the general proportions of the combined form. As a group of individual robots standing together, the five look good for being all the same size, and with ‘good’ being a relative value here. Onslaught’s robot mode is a little slender, but personally, I don’t find it to be negatively so. Brawl is too small-looking in robot mode, coming across as slight and plain tiny. The Combaticons inherently fight all concepts of scale thanks to Blast Off, but a guy who turns into a tank should probably look tough, and this Brawl looks like a child. 

Hit growth spurt early.

Conversely, Swindle seems gigantic compared to the other four, in both modes. Overall, Swindle seems to be the best realized of the team, or like he was designed by a guy who was working independent from the rest of the design team. Other strange visuals include Blast Off’s giant shoulder pads and Vortex’ skirt.

Their vehicle modes are vehicles modes, Cybertron-ized but recognizable. Swindle’s obviously a jeep or truck, Brawl clearly a tank, Vortex clearly a helicopter. Onslaught is more generic Cybertronian truck than anything specifically military, reminding me of G1 Kup’s alt mode. Blast Off is a shuttle, if you squint just right you can see that. 

Then, there’s the combined form. Overall, Bruticus looks gaunt and frail, not the imposing amalgamation of five hardened warriors into a military powerhouse. While the four not-Onslaught figures can be either arms or legs, it seems like they were designed to follow the traditional Bruticus layout of Swindle and Brawl as legs while Blast Off and Vortex serve as arms. Swindle, again, makes fine leg. Brawl seems to be missing the foot part. Combiner hands and feet are integrated into the individual toys, and that is quite a puzzle to contend with. Each of the four has both a hand and a foot, although the hands are the only parts that are actual pieces. Swindle’s jeep mode just stands up; Brawls’ turret folds down and the tank props itself up on that. But the hands. . . .if Swindle was designed by someone isolated from the rest of the design team, the combiner hands were designed by four people from four different companies, and not all of them even toy companies. Each hand is totally different. On top of this, each hand is purposely designed to be either  a left or right hand, and they have thumbs. 

I really should have been bigger....

But again, each hand is completely different. Swindle, again, has the best, because he has two hands: one with a right thumb and one with a left thumb. Blast Off approximates this, like one hand made up of two connecting halves, but with two thumbs, and you just flip out the one appropriate for whichever side of the body he’s on. Brawl has no real hand but flips out some parts to become essentially a claw, and Vortex, well, Vortex. Vortex has a flat palm with a thumb that flips over from the left side to the right. Vortex can either karate chop something or salute Hitler, and that’s just astonishing. 

As I pulled these figures out to take pictures I realized I hadn’t actually played with them for a few years, and was instantly just perplexed by the combiner hand that Vortex has. It makes no sense; it’s like a thing that shouldn’t be there, but for some reason is, and the human brain is working extra hard to make sense of what it’s encountering. 

Once, I was at a restaurant with a self-serve soda machine. I walked over to the soda machine to get soda, and assembled in front of it were six or seven children, probably like eight or nine years old,  trying to get soda. But rather than fill the fairly standard and traditional vessel of the paper cup with soda, the children, every one of them, were using the plastic soda cup lids to corral their beverages and consume them. Yes, the cup lids with the perforation in the center that you press a straw through. And, yes, this resulted in much spilled soda.

Upon witnessing this, I found myself frozen for over a minute, staring at what was unfolding before me, and I could feel my brain, literally feel it inside my skull, twisting and contorting itself to not only process the scene, but also convert it into something that was rational. Have you ever seen a mass of young children filling and refilling plastic cup lids with soda streaming down their forearms, moving as a singular, grotesque entity and all the while acting like what they were doing was perfectly normal? Have you read Dostoyevsky’s Memoirs from the House of the Dead? Do you remember the prison bathhouse scene? Trying to visualize that is the closet parallel I can draw, and it still doesn’t really describe what my mind tried to rationalize that day.

That’s how I felt when I was transforming Fall of Cybertron Vortex after a long time away from the figure, and saw that combiner hand again. Who thought that hand was a good idea? What was the response from the rest of the design team when that guy brought in the Vortex prototype and said “And here’s the hand for the combined mode guys!”?

Road Warrior Blast Off. What a rush!!!

Bruticus as a whole suffers from the Deluxe sized torso figure, and also from arms that basically need to be fan moded to appear even decent. Blast Off in official arm configuration is much, much longer than Vortex, who no matter what seems stumpy. The weapons all combine into some kind of super gun, but if you put all the parts together it looks like crap, mostly due to Vortex’ yellow sword-things.  The headsculpt for the combined form is very nice, but that may just be me looking for something nice to say. Bruticus’ head has been basically the same for 30 years, so that should be something that was done correctly. Combined mode is unstable when standing, which is usually a negative thing.

However, Bruticus is interesting in a number of engineering and design matters. The combiner joints are something of an advancement on the Power Core Combiner square pegs that click into a larger square joint, also similar to the combiner joints on the Energon combiners, or like an amalgamation of the two. Unlike the current joints used in Combiner Wars, which are square joints that just slide into place, these actually required force to attach limbs on the body, and are usually thought of as being more stable connections (thought of…..not that they are) but place stress on the actual joint, to the extent that fears circulated that repeated combinations would break the joints. The hands and feet were a noble effort, but one that was abandoned before the new wave of combiners, and that’s for the best. The parts aren’t intrusive or anything, but they were just so poorly realized. The combiner head integration is pretty poorly hidden, but it maybe the most well-integrated part of the whole.

Really guys, I was designed by the same team!

Ultimately, I think that Fall of Cybertron Bruticus is going to wind up being the combining robot Missing Link. It takes a lot of things from past attempts, and tried them out again. It looks like it was something of a laboratory for developments that would show up in Combiner Wars that would be successful. Fortunately, an entire product line did not spring up based on the ideas and concept of this Bruticus, as we do remember Power Core and how well that worked out. You can see the development in the combiner ports for Combiner Wars figures being the evolution from what Bruticus has, right down to the way they are attempted to be integrated into the bodies of the figures. Bruticus also was, for whatever it winds up being worth, a return to the appropriate naming of combiner team characters, something that had been lost in Powercore and Energon. The guy that is named Swindle is an actual Swindle, not a nameslap: see the tank laughably named Blast Off and helicopter Swindle who were part of the Revenge of the Fallen exclusive Bruticus repaint set. I’ve said this before, but it is important to some degree to have name uses that actually look like the characters the names belong to. Sure, Cybertronians change their alt modes over the course of their millions of years lifespans, but where is it conceivable that Swindle would be some type of land vehicle for millennia and then just decide to be a helicopter instead?

What a difference a few years makes.

Let anyone who has understanding look at FoC Bruticus side by side with any of the Combiner Wars figures, and the separation is startling. It was obvious as soon as the toys were in hand that Bruticus here was not a winner, as there is just too much that isn’t successful to overcome itself. I generally find it amusing that some people who love the alien appearances of the live action movie designs seem to be the most disparaging of FoC Bruticus, as the one thing that I still, after all of this time and distance from the figure, appreciate is that alien appearance. But still, Bruticus’ alien looks are the result of mashing together a bunch of garbage, not, it would seem, the result of purpose. Floppy and thin, fragile looking and disappointing on a play value level.