Dave's Transformers the Last Knight Rant: TRU Exclusives Infernocus Gift Set (TF:Prime Abominus retool) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/TFLK/Infernocus Okay, I already had two full Abominus sets, plus several of the redecos (Rippersnapper got redone a whooooole lot), but decided to get this set to when I saw it on the shelf. https://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Prime/Abominus - original two versions of this mold. CAPSULE $35 exclusively at TRU. Given that they charge $7 each for their Legion movie figures, that's not unreasonable for a target audience that was too young for the toys when Abominus came out, but it's still a bit much for adult collectors. Infernocus: A lot of work was done to replace Hun-gurrr with a new core, but no work was done to fix the flaws of the remaining figures, leading to a combiner that requires several rubber bands to avoid falling over or apart. Really only worthwhile if you want to spend a lot of time customizing it. Otherwise, avoid. RANT Packaging: Sold assembled as Infernocus in a large window box with the hexagon-heavy "Mission to Cybertron" trade dress seen on other TRU exclusives. It's a little flattened and mangled to fit into the box, though. A little clear blue plastic Quintessa figure is in the blister in the lower left. The box is 12" (31cm) tall, 9" (23cm) wide, and 2.5" (6.5cm) deep. The main logo is along the right side of the front, the name and movie logo along the bottom, Mission to Cybertron logo in the lower left. The upper left border has robot mode pictures of all five combining figures. There's no text on the front to indicate Quintessa's role. The right side of the box has a slice of the piece of art commissioned for this exclusive wave, with mainly Optimus Prime visible. The left side has the Cybertron-hexgrid pattern with "CYBERTRON" written in squiggle glyphs. The top flap has the full panorama of the Optimus/Megatron fight, the bottom has the usual legalese. On the back are photos of all the modes of all the things, and the individual names. The high concept behind this set is that in The Last Knight there is a bit where five identical Berserker-style minions (they look like Decepticon Berserker in many ways, but are explicitly not him in the movie) combine via shard-cloud into a bigger version of more or less the same design (i.e. fusion is just a cheap trick to make weak Infernocons stronger). Using the Predacons Rising Terrorcon molds works pretty well for this, but they needed to add a new giant horned head. The instructions are a single large double-sided sheet, a bit clearer than Titans Return instructions, but still a bit lacking. They all start with the combined mode, then show from that to robot and robot to beast. The step listings on the box are somewhat loosely related to the instructions, and seem to mostly be the bot to beast ones. One quarter of one side of the sheet shows how to connect everything up for Infernocus mode. The instructions don't mention what the tabs on the side of the sword are for. Also included is another piece of the trading card puzzle, but this one doesn't connect up to either of the two I already have (and I'm not buying a redeco of MechTech Optimus Prime, or a $40 pack with two deluxes, to get more of the cards). INFERNOCON: INFERNOCUS Assortment: C2024 Altmode: various "dragons" - Rupture, Skulk, Infernocon Thrash, Gorge, Glug. Transformation Difficulty: Rupture 7 steps, Skulk none, Infernocon Thrash 12 steps, Gorge 10 steps, Glug 6 steps, Infernocus not mentioned on box Previous Name Use: None Previous Mold Use: TF:P Epithet: Guard of Quintessa Packaging: 13 ties on Infernocus, 2 on the sword, 1 on Quintessa. In addition to the squashing to fit in the box, the shoulders are mistransformed (tabs on the wrong side so they don't plug in). Actually, it looks like every single limb is mistransformed, although Glug seems to be on purpose, sacrificing stability for having more of a kneecap. Color Swaps: All plastic is now very dark gray verging on black, although under strong light some of the parts are clearly slightly different shades. Paint Apps: Broken down by figure. One weird thing is that when they wanted a sort of worn metal look, they didn't use the usual airbrushing trick to evoke scraped off paint. Instead, they printed the silver on the toy in dots, like silver zip-a-tone. Rupture (Windrazor) - The wing membranes on the outer bits are painted orange, but not the smaller inner sections of the membranes. Orange beast eyes and robot eyes. Infernocon Thrash (Twinstrike) - Orange paint on the robot and beast eyes, and on chest vent details. Gorge (Blight) - Orange eyes on both modes, orange back spines in beast mode, orange chest details in robot mode. Glug (Rippersnapper) - Orange eyes in both modes, fake-airbrishing silver on the back spines. Infernocus combined - The skull face has silver fake-airbrushing printed on it, and orange eyes. There's several orange details on the torso front, and some more fake-airbrushed silver. Glyphs printed in orange on the chest read INFERNOCUS. Mold Changes and Other Notes: Skulk is the big retool, so that Infernocus can have the big horned head. I was curious to see how this would affect his altmode...and the answer is that he no longer has an altmode besides torso. He's an entirely new figure, so I'll cover him below. Skulk's extra size means Infernocus is 8" (20cm) tall if you include the horns, and the proportions are far better than with Abominus. Rather than an entire separate new head, Skulk's head fits in behind Infernocus's face, with Skulk's horns becoming the combined figure's head. Infernocus can turn its head, but not its waist. The new shoulder joints are swivel and hinge, without as much range as Abominus's, but far stronger. Unfortunately, the swivel is so stiff that the upper torso is hard to keep together when turning it. The new torso gives Infernocus stiff ball joint hips, thigh swivels, and nice stiff knee joints. The clips for the legs add an extra layer of clipping with bits going through the stress holes, and making it MUCH harder to detach them. I ended up needing pliers to get Gorge detached. Instead of the individual combining weapons of Abominus, Infernocus comes with a new sword that splits into two weapons for Skulk. It's designed to look like a big robot spine that got torn out and bent into a curved sword. Combined, it's a little over 5" (13cm) long, with a single 3mm peg for a grip and non-standard parallelogram-cross-section pegs on the sides (two on each side). It splits into a sword and a club, each about half the total length, and each with a 3mm peg grip. Near as I can tell, the other figures got no mold changes, which is a pity. If they'd tweaked a few things here and there, the limbs might have been up to the same standards as Skulk's torso mode. Unfortunately, they're still prone to falling apart when you try to pose the figure. Quintessa is a new figure for this set. She's a single piece of clear light blue plastic 37mm tall. She has a 3mm peg hole on the underside, which might be useful if Infernocus had any 3mm pegs that weren't already being used to hold it together. A 2mm hole would have been nice for some cross-line utility. It looks nicely glowy if you set it on an active phone or tablet screen. One thing worth noting is that there are two Rippersnapper redecos in this movie line, they used the mold for yet another Grimlock as part of the all-redecos first wave. And it's clear they will never, ever fix the stupid clip-on head that flies across the room at the slightest provocation. Not sure if it's mold rot or bad luck on my part, but Gorge (Blight)'s pegs for combined mode don't really hold together. And even when it was fresh, Rippersnapper (Glug) had a pretty weak leg mode. As a result, it's not really worth the hassle of trying to display it in combined mode, it's as much luck as anything you do on purpose if it stays standing. A rubber band helped keep Gorge together, but his robot mode toes pop off very easily and they're what passes for heels on Infernocus. Another clear rubber band to hold Glug's head together as the foot. Skulk: This does look similar to the Berserker toy, but with giant "Lord of Darkness from Legend" sort of horns and no vehicle kibble. The tops of the shoulders are flat because they come together to make the combiner torso pelvis, and combiner chest just sort of hangs off the back like a short cloak. They do cleverly work the combiner face into things by having it trapped behind ribs in the torso (the combiner chest has a vague "monster face" motif to it as well). The feet and especially the hands are on the tiny side, but the hands can hold the sword halves decently. In addition to the combiner chest, the looks of the figure are marred by the big clips on the forearms for attaching the legs in combiner mode. 3.75" (9cm) tall at the top of the head, 4.5" (11cm) to the tops of the horns. All very dark gray plastic. The only paint not mentioned under the combiner mode is faux airbrushed silver on the face, and orange eyes. The head can nod up and down a bit, no waist joint. The shoulder joints are a bit weird because of how they become combiner hips: the shoulderpads are hinged to rise up, there's swivels where the arms attach to the shoulderpads, and then there's hinges that let the arms lift up to be as high as straight forward. Then there's standard swivels above the hinge elbows. No wrist articulation. Ball joint hips, swivels just above the hinge knees, no ankle joint. The knees don't straighten all the way, forcing a crouched digitigrade pose. The hands can hold 3mm pegs, and for combination there's two pairs of 3mm peg holes on either side of the ankles. I can't find anywhere on the figure to attach those tabs on the sides of the swords. There isn't a solo beast mode. If they'd made the head able to lift up a bit more, and added a 3mm peg hole to make a sword half into a tail, they could have faked a demon dog mode. http://www.dvandom.com/images/skulkdemondog.JPG for what I'm talking about. Overall: Yyyyeah, give this one a pass. Nice idea, but they didn't fix a single one of the original set's flaws save for "replace Hun-gurrr entirely," and it feels like they gave up too easily on giving Skulk a beast mode. Skulk makes a MUCH better core than Hun-gurrr does, but the limbs retain all their issues, and the stiff joints in Skulk just make everything else more prone to falling apart. Any Transformer that requires rubber bands to stay in a mode is not really something to be spending $35 on. Dave Van Domelen, didn't actually reduce the review queue at all today, since he also found Octone and Blitzwing.