Dave's Human Alliance Basic Rant: Wave 3 Reverb with Sergeant Detour (Hoverbike, Detour is Spike redeco) Crosshairs with Sergeant Cahnay (Thunderhead redeco, not bought) Half-Track with Major Altitude (Sandstorm redeco) Decepticon Drag Strip with Master Disaster (Formula Racer) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/DotM/HABasic3 In theory this was two waves, but they all arrived at once pretty much everywhere I heard about it or saw it. Crosshairs didn't bring enough to the table for me to want to buy another copy of the mold, but Major Altitude is wearing a space suit, which along with a sale ($8.99) was enough to get me to grab it. http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/DotM/HABasic1 - Thunderhead and Sandstorm reviews, plus Spike Witwicky CAPSULES Reverb with Sergeant Detour: Weird vehicle mode, fairly standard transformation and decent robot mode, although mine had joint issues. Partner is a redeco. Recommended largely on the strength of the novelty of the vehicle mode. $10 price point. Half-Track with Major Altitude: Original mold was recommended, this is about as good, plus Major Altitude is a new space suit mold. Mildly recommended if you have Sandstorm, recommended if not. $10 price point. Decepticon Drag Strip: Ambitious design that just doesn't work at this size. Master Disaster is pretty good, but not enough to redeem the overall set. Neutral. $10 price point. RANTS Packaging: Same as previous waves. Crosshairs and Reverb have each other as co-sells, Drag Strip and Half-Track have each other, reinforcing the point that they were intended as separate waves at one time, even if they ended up shipping together. AUTOBOT: REVERB Altmodes: Hoverbike, Gunner Station Partner: Sergeant Detour Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (2) Previous Name Use: Cyb, RotF Previous Mold Use: None Function: Infiltration Assault Motto: "I'm in your base, killing your dudes." REVERB and his human partner engage in recon operations and direct action against fortified DECEPTICON positions. Hovering silently past enemy lines and taking out guards and artillery is their specialty. Fast and dangerous, REVERB and Sergeant Detour are critical members of the AUTOBOT team. STR 6 INT 6 SPD 7 END 4 RNK 5 COUR 8 FRB 7 SKL 9 Avg 6.5 Packaging: Three strings hold the robot into the blister, nothing keeps Detour in (open the blister and he just falls out). The package photo shows the hoverbike mode slightly mistransformed, with the fan chunk slid too far to the right (so it can't properly peg together, and the orange intake bits don't line up). Robot Mode: Generally speaking, it's a fairly typical motorcycle mech. Windshield chest, handlebars on head, seat as pelvis, rear top and rear wheel split as legs (although with the rear wheel being a pair of hoverfans). One notable addition is a big hoverfan on the back, reminiscent of certain kinds of stylized Chinese armor (or the Celestial Armor pieces in City of Heroes). If you unhook the back fan and pull it back a little, you can have an Alliance partner grab hold of the head-mounted handlebars and ride the mech. One other notable addition is a dual blade thing on the left forearm. While hinged to move sideways, it can't fold all the way out of the way. He also has a C-clip system weapon that's two small missiles on a positionable rack. 4.5" (11.5cm) tall at the head, 5" (13cm) at the top of the back-fan. The dominant colors are red, black and light gray, with a few bits of yellow, green and orange. Light gray plastic is used for the faceplate, fans housings, forearms, hips and the center chest. A slightly darker light gray plastic is used for the fans themselves and the twin missiles of the clip-on weapon. Black plastic is used on the handlebars, shoulder joints, elbow joints, hands, neck, knee joints, the wrist blade, a swing-down clip on the butt, the strut for the clip weapon, and some odd little details on the boots. The top of the head and the front of the chest center are clear yellow plastic. The upper arms, boot fronts and most of the torso are bright red plastic. Oddly, while the head is designed in a lightpipe fashion, the eyes are on the same piece as the handlebars...can't really see that ever being made of clear plastic. The majority of the face piece is painted bright red, with a bright green rectangle under the clear "hat". There's also a bright green dot on the chest behind the clear piece. There's some orange dots on the back fan, matte black on the pelvis and gloss black on some details on the shins. A vent detail on the backpack, properly intended for the vehicle mode, is orange with a silver border. The head is on a ball joint at the end of a hinged strut, but the waist doesn't move. The shoulders are hinge-swivel universal joints. The elbows are ball joints on the end of hinge struts, but the hinges don't really add much to the articulation. The wrists are hinged up and down. The hips are ball joints, although on mine they're so floppy that they remind me of a marionette. Took several layers of polish to make them tight enough to let Reverb stand. There's thigh swivels and hinge knees, plus additional hinges above the knees for transformation. The extra hinges don't do much in this mode, as the fans on the backs of the boots block more than 90 degrees of bending anyway. No ankle joints. There's a 3mm rod section on the right forearm for attaching weapons, plus two more on the butt area that are really meant for other modes. The hands are not molded to be able to hold anything. The peg holes on top of the back fan for connection to the main body are 3mm diameter and can mount Cyberverse weapons pretty well. There's also some holes on the back of the outrigger pods of the back fan, but they're too much larger than 5mm to let them hold weapons securely. Similarly, the pegs on the foot-fans meant to go into those holes in weapon mode are too big to hold anything with a 5mm peg hole, but there's a proper 5mm peg on the back of the belt area. Transformation: The legs, unsurprisingly, connect up as the rear wheel and top back of the vehicle. The arms unlock from the sides and the backplate spins around 90 degrees while sliding around some as well. The arms fold up to become sort of fender pieces, with the rear not-a-wheel pegging into the forearm in back. The head sinks into the chest and the center torso folds up to make the front end, which then spins around to face forward, and the back fan pegs into place as a sort of sidecar. Vehicle Mode: This is a bizarre vehicle, as if they started with a motorcycle and then after working out the robot/vehicle transformations decided to tack on enough extra parts to give the Gunner Station a triangular front. Nominally a hovercycle, the rear wheel is replaced by a fenestron- style tail rotor, and the main lift fan is off to the side like a sidecar. There's pretty much no way this thing could stay in the air unless the fanspeeds are so high it gyroscopically stabilizes, in which case it'd maneuver like a pregnant waterbuffalo in a bog. There's no front wheel, instead a random blade sort of thing acts as a cowcatcher, more or less. But the maim frame is still pretty much a standard motorcycle of the street racer variety. 4.75" (12cm) long, and not counting the clip-on missiles (which go on one side or the other) it's 4.25" (10.5cm) wide. Most of the body ends up red plastic, except for the front and rear "bumpers" formed by the forearms, the fans, and a few black details like the handlebars and cowcatcher blade. As with most of the HA Basics, the human partner looks way too small on it, although the fantastic nature of this vehicle mode means you can just handwave and say they're exactly the same scale. If you assume the same 1:32 scale of Sergeant Detour, then this is a nearly 13 foot (3.84m) long hovercycle, with a main lift fan with a blade circle of about a meter. While there's no paint detail visible only in this mode, the intake turbines on the back end top are painted gloss black and make a bit more sense when connected together. The orange vents with gray borders line up in front, and there's some tiny orange dots at the centers of the intake turbines. Also, the two NEST Special Forces tampographs both end up on the left side. The fans all spin more or less freely, and the neck joint lets you wiggle the handlebars a bit. There's 3mm rod sections on the far end of the main fan housing, and on a sort of fold-down handle on the non-fan side of the core undercarriage. Unfortunately, at least on my copy, that second rod is too narrow and the clip weapon flops around. Fixable with a layer or two of sealant, I suppose. The handlebars are 2mm rods for figure hands, and there's another set of handlebars at the back of the seat meant for weapon mode. There's also some foot pedals ahead of the fenestron, but they're not anywhere that a HA figure can use. It's possible to unpeg the main lift fan and fold it under the main body for something more likely to actually fly, but it's not very stable. You can sort of use the clip-on missile piece as a prop on the right side. Rotating the undercarriage into the position used for gunner station mode lets you center the fan a bit better and more stably, although now the front end details aren't lined up. This also puts the scythe blade trailing out the back. Weapon Mode: The rear half of the vehicle splits apart with the halves of the fenestron fan becoming twin fans. Rotate the undercarriage 90 degrees so that the main fan can fold down and connect under the twin fans, for a triangular array of fans. The main chassis is otherwise mostly unchanged (although I like to rotate the headlight section around to robot configuration) and just sticks out behind the fans. The twin missile C-clip weapon goes on the bottom of the main fan, although there's no way this will act as a stand. The 5mm peg section becomes a handle to let a larger toy hold this as a big fan weapon, and if you rotate it to the side the 3mm rod "stirrup" under the headlight section can allow some figures to manage a two-handed grip. Has to be a figure with hands that open and close, though. The odd black peg details attached to the top fan struts are JUST BARELY close enough together for Sergeant Detour to get both feet pegged onto them, but it's really unstable. Either this was designed for larger RotF-style human allies, or someone simply goofed on a measurement. A new set of grips comes together in this mode, though, and you can just have a figure hold onto the sides. The original handlebars are behind the figure now, one reason I like to turn the headlight chunk around is that it gets the handlebars out of the way. The unfolding reduces the length to only 3" (8cm), with the front face being 4" (10.5cm) wide and 3.5" (9cm) tall, not counting the clip-on weapon at the bottom. There's no new plastic or paint revealed in this mode. Reasonably stable, and all three fans spin fairly well. Partner: This is not the same mold as the Sergeant Detour that comes with the Target-exclusive Leadfoot. In fact, it's the Spike Witwicky mold that came with Backfire, done all in black plastic. The gloves, chest armor and knee/shin pads are painted orange. The goggles are orange with white straps. From behind, the only paint visible is on the goggle strap and the gloves. Overall: Oddball and a little hindered by what seems to be deliberate weirdness, but aside from the joint problems on mine there were no major flaws. And it's certainly not something we've seen before, at least in vehicle mode. AUTOBOT: HALF-TRACK Altmodes: Lunar Buggy, Artillery Platform Partner: Major Altitude Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (2) Previous Name Use: G1 Previous Mold Use: DotM Sandstorm Function: Space scientist Motto: "It's full of stars!" AUTOBOT space scientist HALF-TRACK is more than happy to have a human along during his lunar expeditions. His research requires more than a single pair of hands, and it's nice to have a partner who shares his excitement at making new discoveries in deep space. STR 9 INT 7 SPD 4 END 9 RNK 6 COUR 9 FRB 6 SKL 6 Avg 7 Hopefully he doesn't forget that the good Major needs air. Hm, with those stats he doesn't strike me as much of a scientist, but maybe the rigors of the outer deeps mean you need high physical stats just to survive long enough to get good data. :) Packaging: Three strings hold the robot in (oddly, they're torso, legs, left arm...none on right arm). Major Altitude is just held in by the top tray. Color Swaps: Black stays black. The dark gray becomes a slightly cooler gray of the same intensity. Silvery light gray stays the same. The light green becomes misty white, while the tan becomes light faintly metallic blue. Paint Apps: In robot mode, the head has bright blue decoration on the crest that's more extensive than the red on Sandstorm's head. The nose/chin area is silver, as are the exhaust pipes on the forearms. The headlight details on the chest and feet are metallic light green. There's white paint on the armor panels of the thighs and the kneecaps. The only extra paint in vehicle mode is a NEST Special Forces logo on the hood (which is on the underside of the foot in robot mode). No new paint apps are revealed in gun emplacement mode. Mold Changes: None that I noticed. Other Notes: Not sure if this is a manufacturing defect, or I'm just doing something wrong, but I can't get the roll cage to stay connected. Partner: Not a redeco of a human figure I have already, although I believe it's used in at least one other set out there. This is an armored space suit with some sort of weapon mounted on the left wrist (or maybe grapple launchers) and NEST molded into the belt. All black plastic, with yellow-green paint on the visor and on the NEST letters of the belt. The belt and a band around the chest are painted gloss white, as are some details on the hips, kneecaps, and the wrist weapon. 58mm tall with the usual articulation. Either he's awfully short for a stormtrooper, or this is 1:32 scale like the rest of the DotM alliance partner figures. The paint apps are kinda sloppy, but I appreciate that they actually made an astronaut mold for this toy, rather than trying to pass off one of the racing suits as "space marine armor" of some sort. Overall: While it all could have benefitted from some airbrushed gray dust effects, it does make a passable Moon Buggy, especially with Major Altitude's space suit selling it. Although a proper lunar vehicle wouldn't have exhaust pipes. DECEPTICON: DECEPTICON DRAG STRIP Altmodes: Race Car, Weapon (shield) Partner: Major Disaster Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (2) Previous Name Use: Uni2 (HTS exclusive) (Drag Strip alone G1) Previous Mold Use: None Function: Strategist Motto: "Two heads are better than one, even if one of them is wet and squishy." DECEPTICON DRAG STRIP recognized the potential of an alliance with the humans right away. With an expert driver like Master Disaster behind the wheel, DECEPTICON DRAG STRIP is free to concentrate on executing his elaborate plans for the doom of the AUTOBOTS. STR 6 INT 9 SPD 9 END 5 RNK 8 COUR 9 FRB 4 SKL 8 Avg 7.25 Packaging: Three strings hold the robot into the tray, Master Disaster is just loose in the tray. A rubber band holds the head back. While the package photos and instructions show the purple "wings" on the back connected together, they're separated as wings in package. Master Disaster is shown as being dark metallic purple, although it's hard to say if this is an actual prototype difference or the result of overzealous photoshoppery. Robot Mode: I get a strong Energon Mirage (the boat) feeling from this mold, although in the wrong colors. Especially if you follow the instructions and connect the wings in back into a single plate...the pattern evokes Mirage's head. And the big canards stuck on the forearms are like the bits on Mirage's arms. Unfortunately, while lacking the huge boat halves hanging out the back that bedevil Mirage, Drag Strip is pretty kibblicious in his own right. And it's made worse by the lack of stability in the torso, the torso sides peg into place poorly, and this seems to be a design flaw rather than a manufacturing one. 4.75" (12cm) tall at the head, the backplate raises the total height to 6" (15cm). Dominated by yellow, but with significant amounts of black, light gray and metallic purple. The torso core, forearms and boots are golden yellow plastic. The head, torso sides, wheels, toes, bits of spoiler on the butt, and some struts are black plastic. The upper arms, thighs, cravat and some back struts are light gray plastic. The backplate, insides of the boots, and blade weapons are metallic purple plastic. There's a bunch of black paint on the central torso, plus some details on the insides of the forearms. Canary yellow paint covers almost the entirety of the blade weapons, plus some details on the lower shins, and a phoenix or firebird on the side of the chest center. The face and hands are painted silver, the eyes are red. The blade weapons are 2.5" (6cm) long and slightly curved. Clipping them onto the backplate can make it ludicrously tall. They have C-clip struts at the back end. The head is on a ball joint, but if you have the backplate closed the head can't move. Even with it open, vehicle shell stuff on the back of the head restricts motion a lot. The shoulders are ball joints on shrugging transformation hinges, although you have to be careful lest the torso fall apart. There's upper arm swivels and hinge elbows, but not forearm swivels to let the hands assume a position other than "doing curls". Universal joint hips, upper leg swivels, hinge knees and ankles. The knees could bend all the way if the wheels didn't get in the way, and even with them in the way they can bend to about 45 degrees acute. The blade weapons have the usual ball joints for the C-clip struts. Unfortunately, a lot of the joints in my toy are really loose, especially around the shoulders and in the weapons. Even several layers of superglue weren't enough to tighten up one of the weapons, and it hangs loosely. And the fact it's so easy to utterly mess up one joint while trying to move an unrelated one makes this a frustrating toy to play with. The hands are not made to hold anything, although they're in different poses so that one can fit inside the other for vehicle mode. A pair of 3mm rods on the forearms let it wield weapons, and more can be mounted on the rods atop the backplate. Some vehicle connection pegs on the calves can hold C-clip weapons, although it's kinda weird. The peg and hole for connecting the forearms are too small for 3mm system weapons, though. A 5mm rod folds out on the left upper arm (it's used in weapon mode) and could connect something to it, I suppose. Transformation: Very strutworthy. The chest becomes not the nose, as one might expect, but the scoop behind the driver, with the head tucking down into the chest. The arms come out on long hinged struts to form the driver's cage and front of the vehicle, while the legs fold around to bulk out the sides. Pegging the boots onto the chest is vital to stability for the other two modes, but it takes a bit to figure out the trick to it. Vehicle Mode: A somewhat narrow formula racer, it's certainly not proper scale to Master Disaster if it's supposed to be a real one...more of a go cart with a shell kit. It generally looks good aside from being small, but stability is a major problem, especially if you want MD to drive it. You see, while there's a peg for MD's back hole, you can't just put the figure in the seat and peg it in. No, you pretty much have to partially untransform the car, peg in the figure, and re-transform around it. There's no margin for error, even a slight misalignment and it'll just fall apart. 6" (15cm) long, mostly yellow and black with a little gray. The purple parts are mostly hidden, and there's no good place to store the blade weapons in this mode. The painted details on the forearms are now combined into a black triangle on the nose with another yellow phoenix with some red rays. A small purple Decepticon symbol is printed on the chest of the phoenix. When properly assembled, it's pretty stable and rolls well. The steering wheel can turn, but is mostly blocked by the sides. Probably the least awkward place for the blade weapons in this mode is to leave them on their arm mounts and orient them as sort of tusks. Weapon Mode: More of a shield. From car mode, pull the purple wing pieces on the underside out to the sides and attach the blades to 3mm rods on the leading edges. Then fold the spoiler down and the sides out to continue fleshing out the border. A handle flips out from under the nose end, not exactly a good place to hold a shield. The whole assembly is really fragile, especially the blade pieces, which pop out of place if you look at them funny. 6.25" (16cm) long, 3.75" (9cm) wide. The purple wings are revealed, and the all-yellow sides of the blades are on top...picture aside, the underside of the car is not the front of the shield, it's the back. A really weak mode, not really worth bothering. If you must have a third mode, you can do a reasonably good flying car mode by swinging out the purple wings in car mode and then attach the blades appropriately. Partner: Master Disaster recycles a name from an episode of Transformers Animated, but does not share the man's color scheme or "runs illegal street races" MO. Master Disaster is made entirely of smoky clear plastic (save for a few black plastic hinges), the only paint applications are black on his helmet visor and a very hard to see purple Decepticon symbol on the back. This appears to be a new racing suit mold, it's not the same padded racing suit used for Roadbuster's partner. There's some symbols molded into the suit, one of which looks to be a script A with an oval behind it. The ones on the chest are either Japanese characters or Cybertronian glyphs. Standard DotM HA figure articulation. Overall: This design feels like it would have worked better if made at least 20% larger, preferably amped up all the way to the $30 scale. There's just too much stuff that needed thicker plastic or better pegs or a different kind of joint to really work. And while Master Disaster is one of the best partner figures, he's not worth ten bucks on his own. Nor is "best partner figure" that much above "damning with faint praise". BONUS TRACK AUTOBOT: CROSSHAIRS Altmodes: Mobile Weapon, Mech Suit Partner: Sergeant Cahnay Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (2) Previous Name Use: G1, Movie1, Universe Previous Mold Use: DotM Function: Pinpoint Artillery Motto: "One shot, one kill." CROSSHAIRS demands that every round of ammunition be accounted for. He is extremely careful in his targeting, not wanting to waste a single shot. His rate of fire is slow, even in the hottest combat, but his incredible accuracy more than makes up for it. STR 5 INT 7 SPD 4 END 8 RNK 7 COUR 5 FRB 5 SKL 8 Avg A green (not camo shade, though) and gray redeco of Thunderhead. I wibbled on whether to get this and complete the set, but in the final analysis there wasn't enough about this to grab me. I suppose it's possible I might change my mind later, especially if I find it on clearance later on. Presumably this is Augie Cahnay's brother, who went into the service instead of racing. Or maybe his son, if we want to posit that the G1 character was active in racing in the 1980s. I'm sure fanfic has already been written exploring both ideas. And no, you don't need to send me links to it. Dave Van Domelen, will probably do Cyberverse Soundwave next, and then the NYCC Prime set.