Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Voyager Wave 2 Decepticon Brawl (Tank) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/VBrawl Oddly, the movie Brawl has never gotten a Voyager toy, despite being brought back repeatedly in lines for movies he didn't appear in. CAPSULE $30 price point. Decepticon Brawl: It's kinda annoying for a "premium" sort of toy (with the premium price) to have an assembly error, but I got one. Otherwise, it's complex without being frustrating (the transformation is actually pretty quick once you learn the tricks), looks as decent as a Bayformer can, and it finally fills a gap in the Brawl size chart. Recommended. RANT Packaging: Basically the same as Thundercracker's, but without the TRU stickers. Note, Brawl and Megatron are 12 and 13, the numbers 10 and 11 are for Jazz and Lockdown in a half-sized second wave of Deluxes. Warning: check yours in package carefully if there's more than one on the shelf. Mine came with two left-side missile pods, so in tank mode they can't both rest snugly against the turret. DECEPTICON: DECEPTICON BRAWL Assortment: 12 Altmode: Tank Transformation Difficulty: 36 steps (wince) Previous Name Use: Movie1, RotF, Gen Previous Mold Use: None Movie: Movie1 Scene: Mission City Battle DECEPTICON BRAWL rips through metal and concrete, fulfilling his evil orders from MEGATRON. Yeah, not much personality to be found. In the first movie they seemed scared to give characterization to most of the villains, treating them as impersonal monsters. This would persist with few exceptions...for all its faults, at least The Last Knight tried to give a little personality to the quickly-jobbed Decepticons. Packaging: Six ties and one rattan string hold the robot into the tray, with a plastic shield over the torso to protect the mine sifters. One tie each on the two hand weapons. The backdrop is a shattered downtown LA street scene, similar to Ratchet's (I'd compare more closely, but I already threw out my Deluxe wave 1 packages). Robot Mode: This character's always been kinda lacking in the shoulders and upper arms, and they didn't really fix that. I mean, they did make the upper arms wider, but they lack depth, being basically bas relief rather than fully three dimensional. And the shoulders are smaller than those found on a lot of Legends-scale figures. The puny shoulders are somewhat mitigated by the rocket pods mounted on struts over the shoulders, but there's definite Popeye arms going on here. Another unfortunate design element is the way the mine sifters are stuck way out on overly long struts, with no way to fold them flush against the body. For some reason, the head seems to have been scaled up in size for a much bigger toy, and is too large for the one it's on. By the visual rule of thumb that bigger heads mean smaller overall size, this looks like a version of Brawl that's the size of a human child, rather than one that you'd expect to tower menacingly over human children. Chibi Brawl does not work for me. In a lot of ways, this feels like a design that looked pretty good on paper, but once all the compromises were done it just doesn't quite make it. 6.25" (16cm) tall at the top of the head, with two cannon barrels sticking up significantly above that, for a total height of 7.5" (19cm). It's predominantly olive green, with accents of silver and black, plus barely visible tiny red eyes. Almost all of the plastic is olive green, although some of the softer bits (cannon barrels, mostly) are a slightly lighter shade. Silvery gray plastic is used on the shoulder joints, the hip joints (including some Bayformery shard flair), the elbow joints, and the claws snapped onto one of his weapons. The knee joints, tread wheels, and some bits mostly internal to the torso are black plastic. There's a lot of silver paint, on the fists/forearms, parts of the quadcannon weapon, the face, the kneecaps, the tops of the hips, and a lot on the feet. There's a few silver strips ont he torso as well. The bottom of the sternum and the centers of the shins are painted gunmetal. The treads on the shoulders and boots are painted black. There's some forest green paint visible on various tank armor pieces, but rather little of the actual tank armor is really intended to be visible in this mode. It's very much a shellformer in that respect, albeit one that divides up the shell fairly evenly across the robot mode. There is no Decepticon symbol in this mode. The head is on a ball joint, it can turn as well as look up and down a bit. No waist articulation, even though the transformation doesn't forbid it. The shoulders are universal joints. The elbows are weird, with dual hinges one above the other in addition to a swivel just above this arrangement. The elbow weirdness seems to be required for transformation, and it requires some massaging in that. No wrists. Universal hips, swivels just above the hinged knees. The knees snap into straight leg position but are not otherwise ratcheting. No ankle articulation, pegs prevent the transformation hinge from moving. The boots can rattle a bit, there's some armor panels held in place by small tabs that don't always work. The mine sifters are on ball joints, but the struts don't move so the result makes it look like he has four arms but never knows what to do with the smaller arms. The hands can hold 5mm pegs, but they need to be fairly long to get past the thumb molding. There's also 5mm peg holes on the forearms, which seem to be the preferred means of holding weapons. The turret on the back has two more 5mm peg holes, useful for storage in robot mode and the intended locations of the hand weapons in vehicle mode. There's a 3mm peg hole in the back of the pelvis, but it's mostly blocked by the main cannon hanging down like a tail. Fortunately, they realized this was a problem, and added another 3mm peg hole in the center of the turret backpack. There's two or three hand weapons, depending on how you look at it. The first has a four-barrel cannon arrangement with floodlight and what appears to be a non-detachable entrenching tool folded up against it. The business end of this looks identical to the rocket pods on the shoulders, so maybe those are supposed to be cannons this time. It attaches via a 5mm peg near the rear that's flattened on two sides but thicker than the pegs used for the other weapons. The second hand weapon is a sort of ungainly claw/shield thing with a small 6-barrelled minigun attached to it. The claw folds back some, but not enough to actually stow. It attaches via a rectangular handle that is rounded to fit into a 5mm peg hole. The minigun is attached to the claw weapon via a similar, if shorter, rounded rectangular peg. It can barely fit into one of the fists, as the thumb details get in the way and the short peg is barely able to reach the concealed 5mm hole. The minigun ends up feeling more like a loaner weapon than something Brawl would ever use separate from its dock in the claw shield. There's enough partial holes and tabs all over these weapons to suggest the possibility of combination into a single super weapons, but they don't. It's somewhat frustrating...just making the quad cannon's peg a little thinner, or widening a gap a little here or there would have allowed weapon combination, and they decided to not do it. Again, it's as if they planned all this out early on, but budget reasons cancelled it so they just fused several pieces together and tweaked other parts to eliminate any remaining possibilities. In addition to the hand weapons, the rocket or cannon pods over the shoulder are on hinged struts that end in ball and socket joints, so they can be pointed in a decent variety of ways (although with mine being two of the same, it's hard to get it to look right in anything but straight forward poses). The rest of the tank weapons point straight up or down with no real mobility. Transformation: Despite being really long, I was able to figure it out without looking at the instructions. The hardest part was assembling the turret from the arms, because there's several joints that need to be in just the right places. The box isn't lying about there being a LOT of steps, but unlike most overly complicated movie toys, it's not terribly frustrating. Even the turret is only moderately annoying, and once I'd gotten the tactile sense of where parts are supposed to go, I was able to transform it pretty quickly. In fact, aside from forgetting I needed to rotate the main gun before I could transform the front end, the whole transformation was pretty short the second time around. Steep initial learning curve, but easy afterwards. Vehicle Mode: This is the "fantasy" tank we got to know in the first movie, more or less an Abrams MBT but with a secondary two-gun turret on top of the main turret, and rocket launcher pods on the secondary turret. And when the movie first came out, the "You dog, I heard you like..." meme was actually fresh. And this toy cranks it up another notch by tacking even more weapons on top of the secondary turret. The main hull is 5.5" (14cm) long, making it about 1:72 scale (yes, same scale as the average Hot Wheels car). Including the main gun and the fuel tanks on back, the total length is 7.5" (19cm). The colors are mainly olive green and forest green, with black treads. No new plastic colors visible, and other than the claw weapon all the non-green plastics are hidden. The hull, main turret, and secondary turret have extensive forest green paint on the olive green plastic, as camo. There's no insignia of any kind in this mode. I mean, the lack of a Decepticon symbol makes sense, since he was hiding out in a military depot. But no Army stuff? (No need for Reprolabels here, just go to the hobby shop and get some slip decals.) It rolls on the usual concealed tiny wheels inside the treads, and the secondary top turret can spin around as well as spread out the struts with the quad weapons. The main turret does not move at all, making it more like a tank destroyer than a tank. The mine sifters are on their ball joints, but can't be lowered to actually sift the ground in front of the tank. The two 5mm peg holes on the turret are meant to hold the two hand weapons (claw on the left, quad cannon on the right), leaving no room to really put anything in the 3mm hole. I suppose you could shave a Lego rod down a bit and use it as a flagpole or antenna. Overall: Within the limits of the movie design, it's a decent toy, and its complexity isn't a punishment for the owner. I'm a touch annoyed by the QC issue on mine, you'd think that a $30 Voyager would get a little more attention. Dave Van Domelen, will do Megatron after taking a break to review Alchemist Prime and Alpha Trion.