Dave's Age of Extinction Rant: Deluxe Wave 2 Strafe (Two-headed pteradon, reviewed elsewhere) Autobot Drift (Bugatti Veyron) Dinobot Slash (Raptor) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/AoE/Deluxe2 I found the Evolutions Strafe a week before finding the rest of this wave, so I reviewed it already on its own, over here: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/AoE/EvoStrafe There don't seem to be any significant differences between the versions, once you get them out of the packaging. Wave 2 also shipped with more of the Bumblebee I'm not planning to get, even now that it's only $10 at Walmart. CAPSULES $15 price point. Strafe: Mildly recommended, maybe wait to see if you can find it at $10. Autobot Drift: Not too bad of a design for a panelmaster, but really suffers from a lack of colors. It's very very blue, they don't even break it up with different joint colors in robot mode. Mildly recommended, but you might want to wait to see if a redeco fixes the blandness issue. Dinobot Slash: No, not romantic Dinobot/Rattrap fanfic, which I'm sure exists but would rather not verify. Clever design, but suffers from a couple of bad design or implementation issues. I seem to like it a lot better than most people whose opinions I've seen, but I still can't do more than mildly recommend it. Yeah, not the best wave ever. And it ships with more Bumblebees, to add insult to injury. RANTS Packaging: Same as wave 1. The difference between the movie coloration shown in the package art and the actual toy on Slash is pretty striking. Headcanon time: after the movie, all the Dinobots decided to get new paint jobs, which are represented in the toys. ;) AUTOBOT: AUTOBOT DRIFT Series: M4 Number: 006 Altmode: Bugatti Veyron Transformation Difficulty: 16 Steps Previous Name Use: Gen Previous Mold Use: None Weapon: Many Swords Function: Street Samurai Motto: "Perhaps it is we who are the Knights of Cybertron." AUTOBOT DRIFT used to fight for the DECEPTICONS. Now, he wields his swords against them, alongside the heroic AUTOBOTS! So, while he looks nothing like Dorifitu other than turning into a car and having swords, this is meant to be the same sort of character. Packaging: Loose in the blister, with two small tray tops over the feet and the crossed swords to keep things stable. The main swords are held in the hands, crossed in front of the chest. The short swords are held into the blister in the upper right corner by a small tray top. Seems to be properly transformed. The instructions don't mention storage for the large swords, and the intended place is actually kinda hard to find, being pegs of dark blue plastic in an interior location. The parallelogram-shaped holes in the swords fit onto similarly shaped pegs inside the engine cover piece on the back. Robot Mode: While Grimlock has some slight samurai motifs, Drift goes all out: laminated armor shoulderpads and thigh pads, kabuto helmet, sword array on the back...to the point where the Bugatti elements such as the grille on the chest (which is the real grille from vehicle mode, impressively enough) or the Bugatti logo beltbuckle (backwards E stuck to a B, for Ettore Bugatti) seem anachronistic. The upper arm armor pads can be moved away from the arms, but I don't recommend doing so. Leaving the utterly unpainted monochrome and skinny arms separate like that ends up looking like a knockoff toy design. 5" (13cm) tall at the head, if you mount the blades on the back they rise a bit above the head. It's medium-dark blue, metallic light blue, black, and a little silver and gold. It definitely has a problem with insufficient contrast, and putting even a different shade of blue in the limb plastic would have helped a lot. The shoulder armor panels, the wheels, and the feet (which form the rear bumper and spoiler) are black plastic, the lightpiping and some of the backpack car shell stuff are clear light blue plastic, and the swords are golden brown plastic. Otherwise, it's all medium-dark blue. The joints might be a different kind of plastic, but the color match is annoyingly good. I almost never see this kind of uniformity in plastic color outside of a knockoff, seriously. The face and helmet crest are painted gold, the wheel hubs are painted silver, and the center of the chest is painted black. Metallic medium-light blue paint is used extensively, on the fake chest bumper, the abdomen, the laminated armor panels on the shoulders and thighs, and several car parts I'll discuss later. No Autobot symbol, but there's a small red bit painted on the chest grille, probably a no-detail Bugatti emblem. The head is on a restricted ball joint, the waist does not turn. Universal joint shoulders, fairly stiff (to the point I worry about breaking them) swivels just above the ratcheting hinge elbows. The wrists are hinged to wiggle back and forth a bit so they can fit into their designated space in vehicle mode, and at least they're molded in proper sword-holding direction rather than barbell curling. Univeraal joint hips with ratcheting on the spread-out direction, mid-thigh swivels, hinge knees. The car kibble gets in the way of bending the knees a bit, but can be swung out of the way. The transformation joints on the ankles are useful for posing. The hands can hold 5mm pegs, and there's that mysterious 3mm hexagonal peg hole on the underside of the pelvis that several other Deluxes have. I'm pretty sure now that this was included for holding the torso on a jig during assembly. [Later note: it has been suggested that this is an undocumented feature, meant for attaching posing stands as seen on Gundam kits and the like. I'm skeptical of this, but I suppose it's possible, or a feature intended for the TakaraTomy audience that's more likely to have access to such stands.] The swords and daggers have rectangular pegs that are 5mm wide, so they hold a little loosely in Drift's hands. They also have hexagonal 5mm pegs on the sides of the crosspieces so that they can store on peg holes. In robot mode they store on the outermost piece of the backpack (daggers on 5mm pegs, swords on the previously mentioned parallelograms). In vehicle mode, the daggers store in peg holes under the roof piece and the swords store on peg holes in the robot torso (they're hidden in robot mode). There's not a lot of clearance on the peg holes in the backpack, so not much else could store there. Note, don't try storing the swords with the tips tucked in under the feet. You don't gain any ground clearance doing so, and you bend the blades. Transformation: The backpack pulls out, unfolds into nearly the entire top of the car, and spins around. The chest folds up, the head flips back, and this makes room for the arms to shrug up and in a bit. Then it's a matter of unfolding all the panels and connecting them together. You can wait until it's time to snap the top down to store the daggers, and the swords store once you're done. Getting the panels all to fit together is, as one might expect, a bit of a pain unless you get lucky. The hardest part for me was getting the front fenders snapped to the hood properly. Vehicle Mode: This is a newer model Bugatti Veyron than was used back in Cybertron for Crosswise, specifically the Bugatti Veyron EB 16.4 Super Sport World Record Edition (the world record in question being its top speed of 267 mph, although it's limited to 258 normally to prevent the tires from disintegrating). Between this and Crosshairs being a race model as well, it's pretty clear that when the Autobots give up on hiding, they totally give the electronic middle finger to the idea of blending in, yes? It's a rear-engine design (Wikipedia says "mid-engine" but that just means it's not all the way at the back like an old VW Beetle), so the front end hood really only covers up a very small storage compartment, and there's airscoops behind the roof to channel air into the four turbochargers (the 4 in 16.4, with the 16 being the number of cylinders). It has a rather high spoiler, probably because it has to clear the turbulence of the airscoops. The paucity of color variation is much less of a problem here, and the blue paint on the parts that aren't blue plastic match the plastic pretty well. About the only paint it really feels like it's missing would be silver on the side mirrors, something on the EB logo on back, and black on the grille bits in the airdam. 5" (12.5cm) long, so about 1:36 scale. It's blue. The metallic blue paint rims the front grille and then runs along the very bottom of the front and sides, swooping up along the doors and covering the lower half on the rear end. Oddly, they used a non-metallic pool blue paint on the very back (the parts that are the heels in robot mode). The headlights and taillights are painted silver. The roof, A-posts and doors are painted over in blue, as the roof is clear plastic and the doors are black plastic. Nearly invisible black Autobot symbols are printed on the doors. Undocumented feature: If you pop up the engine compartment, it looks kind of like it was intended to be a missile rack, and a little bit of paint on the airscoops could help it look like a weapon again. Overall: It's a monochrome panelmaster, and like Crosshairs suffers from having an existing colorful design to fall short of (the Dinobots are all more colorful than their movie versions, by contrast). Other than the panel stuff, it's a decent enough mold, you might want to wait to see if a redeco down the line has more colors. DINOBOT: DINOBOT SLASH Series: M4 Number: 007 [The name is Slash. Dinobot Slash.] Altmode: Raptor Transformation Difficulty: 13 Steps Previous Name Use: None Previous Mold Use: None Weapon: unnamed, so I'll call them Featherweight Hatchets Function: Escape Artist Motto: "Beauty like mine should never be locked away." There's no situation DINOBOT SLASH can't escape. He can carve an opening and slip out undetected, or battle his way out with his razor-sharp claws! The color scheme reminds me of Archadis from BW Neo, who was played very bishie in the manga. So I figure this is his reincarnation, hence the vanity in the motto I created. ;) Packaging: Does the now-standard trick of mangling the back end and hiding the results behind the card insert. A single blister insert keeps the feet and tail in place. You don't need to do a whole lot to get it in proper dino mode, just flip up the tail and adjust the legs. The right side ribcage piece on mine didn't want to go into proper position, but that turned out to be an assembly error: it has two left side ribs. The connector strut doesn't have the indentation on the correct side to let it fit flush, and the rib-claw piece is also backwards and doesn't quite fit. I contacted Hasbro customer support, but unfortunately, they're still in the mode of "Send us the defective product and we'll send you another one eventually, or maybe a random toy with the same cost." So I guess once I finish the review I'll box Slash up and see if I can get a refund at TRU next time I'm in Joplin. Dinobot Mode: This is a feathered raptor, although the feathers are meant to be metal blades all over the place rather than purely decorative feathery material. Very colorful, done up in teal and neon yellow, so I suppose they went with red eyes because the usual metallic blue would be lost against the teal head. 8" (20cm) long from snout to tail tip, with the head rising 5" (13cm) above the table. As a raptor of any stripe, it's utterly out of scale with pretty much all the other Dinobots...in fact, if it's meant to be a Utahraptor, it would be to scale with the typical 4" action figures on shelves these days. All of the neon yellow bits are rubbery plastic: the entire tail, feathers on the thighs, elbows and two flaps on the back. The hips, kneecaps, and a few bits of visible jointing on the back of the neck are matte black plastic, otherwise the rest of the toy is teal plastic in this mode. There's gloss black paint adorning much of the face, plus the claws on both forelimbs and hindlimbs. Some black is airbrushed onto the roots of the back-mounted feathers, and teal paint airbrushed along the top of the tail. The front of the neck is painted neon yellow. A bit of teal paint airbrushed onto the thigh feathers to blend them better into the legs would have been nice. The teeth are painted silver and the eyes are painted red. There are a bunch of transformation joints that strictly speaking can be used for some articulation here, but it tends not to look good, so I won't go into them. The head nods up and down a little and the jaw hinges open. The forelegs are on ball joints, but somewhat kibble-restricted by the feathers at the elbows. The hips are ball joints. The knees are hinges, but bending them more than a little bit makes the robot fists pop out or recede too far. There's some angle-cut swivels in the ankles for transformation which can be used to help keep the feet flat. There's no peg holes or other generic weapon attachment points on this mode. The axes store in the forelimbs, their blades becoming the elbow feathers. Transformation: The hind legs become arms, with some fairly clever folding and rotating to get the claws onto the forearms. The way the head and neck split into legs is REALLY clever, and the section with the ribcage parts spins around and locks in place (it snaps in place well for both modes), with the ribcage pieces becoming shoulderpads. About the only lazy part of the transformation is that the tail just folds back to reveal the head, becoming a huge backpack. Once I got the hang of dealing with the kibble bits, it was actually a pretty easy transformation, and very well thought-out. Robot Mode: Unfortunately, as clever as the transformation is, it does result in rather skinny legs and a huge amount of upper body kibble, so this is one unstable bot. Even leaving aside Hasbro's notorious QC issues (the hip joints pop out way too easily on mine), it's not the most stable of designs. Visually, they continue the two Dinobot motifs: knight-helmet heads and pointed toes. In this case, the helmet has a faceplate with vertical slits, which would be more striking if they'd painted it silver and left the slits black. The top of the helmet looks more like a hard hat, though. On the down side, the back feathers make for kneepads so tall that they cover the entire length of the thighs and then some, even if you pull them all the way forward. They don't really add much to the dino mode in the first place, but simply cutting them off would leave big hinge joints you'd also need to remove. [Later note: the thighs can be popped off and switched, so that the feathers are on the backs of the legs and on the belly in dino mode. This looks better, is less awkward, and doesn't require any dremeling.] Note that if you lift the tail back up to almost cover the head, it looks like he's ready to join the Knights of Unicron hair metal band. 4.75" (12cm) tall and pretty broad-shouldered thanks to the ribcage pieces, there's more black in the color balance in this mode. The fists, thighs, and upper arms are black plastic, plus there's black paint on the face and abdomen. The visor eyeslit is painted red. Notable is the lack of an Autobot symbol in either mode, as far as I can tell. The neck and waist are both swivels, although the thigh feathers make it hard to take advantage of the waist joint. Shoulders are ball joints, and there's upper arm swivels. The elbows are nearly useless, because the forearms are huge and the upper arms are very short, so they can only bend a little bit, and that in the "barbell curls" fashion. Wrists are hinged and can wiggle in and out a bit independently of their transformation hinge. Basically, treat the arms as if they don't even have elbows and use the upper arm swivels to put the fists in the desired orientation. Hips are loose ball joints, the thigh swivels are below the connection points of the thigh feathers, and the knees are hinges with a decent range. The toes are on hinges, but it's not a useful joint. Overall: Really, the only truly bad thing about the toy (other than mine being misassembled) is the back/thigh feathers. I expect I'll remove those once I swap out my current one for a properly assembled one (and paint the faceplate). Otherwise, it's a pretty clever design that's only slightly hurt by Hasbro QC (the loose hips are an easy fix). Dave Van Domelen, knows he said that he shouldn't do any more reviews before moving, but got ahead on packing.