Dave's Combiner Wars Rant Voyager Wave 5-ish Onslaught (Hot Spot retool) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/VOnslaught This wave also includes Scattershot, Sky Lynx, and some reships. It seems to be shipping in at least two different case assortments simultaneously (one with Scattershot, one with Sky Lynx, both with Onslaught), if not more. I picked up Scattershot but am leaving it unopened for now...word is that the Technobots will only be a gift set (and likely a Japanese-only gift set) release, making a singleton Voyager Scattershot a bit of a waste of my money. https://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/VHotSpot - Hot Spot review CAPSULE $25 price point. Onslaught: Original mold was recommended. This does a pretty good job of looking right without being 100% remolded, although it suffers from some of the same problems as Hot Spot (swivels falling apart) and the vehicle mode depends on hip ratchets that may be misaligned in order to stay in shape. Recommended, but you may need to play exchange games a bit before you find one with good joints. RANT Packaging: Same as previous Combiner Wars Voyagers. The Bruticus accent color is, appropriately, olive drab. DECEPTICON: ONSLAUGHT Component: Torso Altmode: Anti-aircraft Cannon Truck Transformation Difficulty: 13 steps (odd, since Hot Spot had 17, guess 4 of those were for the ladder assembly) Previous Name Use: G1, G2, Uni2, Movie1, Gen(FoC) Previous Mold Use: Gen Weapon: Sonic Cannons Function: Combaticon Leader Motto: "The mind is the greatest weapon...but the Enigma of Combination is clearly a close second." ONSLAUGHT has made the COMBATICONS into a nearly unstoppable strike force. He commands his team with the precision of a general and expects them to carry out his brilliant plans to perfection. Packaging: The two rifles are combined in the blister with two ties holding them in. Seven ties on the robot mode. The heel spurs are not folded down. There's significant retooling here, so I'm going to review it as if it were a new mold. The following parts are not remolded: upper arms, forearms, pelvis, back, thighs, knees, wheels. The boots aren't remolded, but the mold was cleverly designed to let them add in heel spurs on this toy, to compensate for the smaller toes. The rifles are also the same as Hot Spot's. Robot Mode: About the only part that really says Obvious Retool here is the presence of Hot Spot's lightbars on Onslaught's knees, although the shock-coils on the forearms are a secondary hint. Those, at least, don't actually look out of place like the lightbars. Other than those elements and the "combiner kibble backpack" replacing the simple dual cannon rig, it looks more like a proper Onslaught than any of the other previous updates. And I only just now (well "now" being at some point during typing this review, which I did massively out of order) realized that his head is fashioned after an 1800s military "shako" officer's cap. The kind worn by the Captains in classic Stratego game pieces. 7" (18cm) tall at the head, add an inch (2.5cm) if you put the rifles on the backpack. A mix of olive drag, blue-gray, very dark brown that looks black, and light silvery gray, with some silver and purple accents. The head and wheels are a very dark brown plastic that looks black under normal light. Part of the backpack, the bit that partly conceals Bruticus's head, is also made of this. Silvery light gray plastic is used for the rifles, the upper arms, the thighs, the heel spurs, and the parts of the backpack that become Bruticus's chestplate. The rest of the toy is made of blue-gray (sort of denim colored) plastic. Olive drab paint is used on the fronts of the shoulderpads and the front of the pelvis. The thighs are dipped in metallic black paint. A matte heather color (a kind of purple) is used for details on the pelvis and for the lightbars on the kneecaps. The chest is painted silver with accents in red, yellow, and dark blue. The visor is painted red. A purple on silver Decepticon symbol is printed on the abdomen. Same articulation as Hot Spot, except for the head which is just on a swivel, and the heel spurs which have a bit of useful play in them. So I'll just do some cut-and-pasting: The shoulders are ratcheting swivels and can lift up on ratcheting transformation hinges, plus there's a smooth lift-to-the-sides hinge connecting the upper arms to the shoulderpads. Smooth upper arm swivels just above soft-ratcheting elbows. No wrist articulation. Universal joints on the hips ratchet in both directions. Smooth hinge knees, no meaningful foot articulation. The thighs on this aren't as prone to popping apart at the swivels as on Hot Spot, but the upper arms pick up the slack and work themselves apart very easily. The knees rely on getting a double-folding joint to tuck inside the kneecap part of the boots, mine was mistransformed in the box with the knees seeming to rely on a soft-ratcheting hinge that is simultaneously too weak to actually support the figure and too strong to make it easy to get the knees properly transformed. Not sure if I got lucky with Hot Spot or if there was an actual (if minor) tooling change. The backpack can be lifted up about 45 degrees without disassembling the parts, I suppose being useful for taking anti-aircraft shots with the cannons when they're on the backpack. The cannons are identical to Hot Spot's fireball cannons, but cast in light silvery gray. The fists are the same as Hot Spot's with 5mm peg holes, but they can't really hold Shockwave's gun mode. The middle finger makes the fist too thick to let the trigger-guard-like thing on Shockwave's handle fit over it, so it can only be held gingerly with the peg inserted a finger's width. The gun can fit onto the backpack, but the toy is already back-heavy and this gets it right to the edge of falling over even with the heel spurs. Transformation: About the same as Hot Spot, but the backpack doesn't really have to do anything and no part of it gets between the forearms. Some new bits on the shoulderpads fold up to become the tiny drivers' compartments, and bits of Bruticus's chestplate fold down to fill in the gaps on the side and prevent the turret from turning. The new toes just fold up to minimize their profile...and this does mean that the arms are the front of the vehicle, rather than the back as in Hot Spot's case. If the hip ratchets aren't lined up just right, the vehicle ends up bowing upwards a tiny bit in the middle. Also, the lack of ladder piece between the forearms makes the front end a little less solid, while the conversion to the feet leaves the combiner sockets in back hang open. Vehicle Mode: Hot Spot's oddball back end now makes perfect sense as the sloped armor front end of Onslaught's command truck mode. But with no ability to turn and rather limited ability to elevate (either just rotate the plugged in cannons, or disconnect the collar piece from its slots and raise the whole thing, revealing Bruticus's head) it verges on "well, it has an altmode, just nothing in particular". As disappointing as it might have been, G1 Onslaught's vehicle mode at least had integral cannons...removing the rifles here just turns it into an 8-wheeler carrying some combiner kibble. 8" (20cm) long, and at a guess it's about 1:144 scale (the windows are very small, but in an armored vehicle you want smaller windows, so a driver 2cm tall might actually fit, but a 1.4cm driver may be more plausible to allow for thickness of armor and suspension and stuff). The olive green is almsot totally hidden, along with most of the other paint. The heather lightbars are still visible, obviously, but other than the kibble chunk on top, it's almost entirely blue-gray with very dark brown wheels. Since the robot mode Decepticon symbol is no longer visible, they put one on each side just behind the front wheels. No articulation other than limited motion of the guns as noted earlier. The wheels mostly spin well despite being snap-ons, but one of the eight on mine is sticky. There's a paired set of slots on top of the not-turret, one round and one rectangular, for attaching Shockwave's cannon mode. It's a very loose fit, with the grip just resting on top rather than plugging in as if on a proper peg hole. Torso Mode: The instructions for this are a bit messed up. They have you undo the shoulders in the second to last step for some reason, probably a cut and paste error. The arms do transform differently than on Defensor, though, with the forearms up on top of the shoulders rather than underneath. Getting everything together is much simpler, since the smaller backpack only folds up over the top like a Lego minifigure chestpiece, rather than the whole wraparound trick Defensor needs. Other than the incongruous purple lightbars on the hips, it looks pretty Bruticus-like. They decided to go with a black helmet, as opposed to the gray helmet of the G1 toy and animation model (some G1 comic portrayals gave Bruticus a black helmet, but some also gave him Onslaught's entire head, so...). I had to take the head apart to find what color plastic it is, and even then only the screw holes were left unpainted. It's light silvery gray plastic, then dipped in the metallic black paint before having the faceplate painted silver and the eyes (which are molded like lightpiping) red. The forearms pop off pretty easily, but they're cosmetic. More of a problem with the right arm, because it only has one tab compared to a tab and a peg for the left arm (the peg that helps hold the front end of vehicle mode together). The chest wings hold the shoulder roots in solidly enough to allow for posing the combiner's arms without undoing the torso sides. I tried mounting Shockwave on the open peg on the backpack for storage, but it was way too loose. The chest wing bits have to be pulled off before you can install an arm, which does add a little bit of hassle not present on other combiner cores. Bruticus: Looks very G1, the color balance is quite good (although the helmet is the wrong color, as noted). The head is on a restricted ball joint, and the bottom part of the chestplate is on a hinge so it can get out of the way for poses where one or both legs swings forward at the hip. Unfortunately, the joints aren't strong enough to support dynamic poses, and putting Shockwave in either arm makes the whole thing kip over forward unless the arm is lifted out to the side. Gonna leave Shockwave with chibi human Twilight Sparkle. Overall: When you come right down to it, the torso mode is the most important, since combiners tend to stay in combined mode the majority of the time (unless you're the kind of person who will buy two sets so they can display in both combined and individual modes). And maybe I just rolled badly on too many of the components, but this is about as unstable as my Fall of Cybertron Bruticus. You may want to buy two and return whichever one has the worst joints. Dave Van Domelen, will buy Sky Lynx when he sees it, having already bought the limbs for Sky Reign.