Transformers Generations Blaster and Steeljaw Review

"There's no hope for him now, Travis. He's suffering. You know we've got to do it."

"Yes, Mama. But he was my dog. I'll do it."

I had no real interest in either of the data disc launching bots from the Generations Fall of Cybertron range. Deluxe Soundwave, from the previous game, already stands proudly on my shelf looking rather cool. A Blaster repaint was duly released, but it did not really catch my interest - I wanted a Boom Box Blaster, or at least something much different to a repainted Soundwave.
Blaster deserves that at least.

However, recently Amazon went price drop crazy, and Blaster appeared at only £11 or so shipped to the UK.

Even I with my legendary tightness (not that this probably conveys across on a blog where I show off my latest hideously expensive toys), I could not resist.

Hit "READ FULL REVIEW" below, to see the complete review, and photo's, after the jump

Transformers Generations Starscream Review

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas? Filled with toys, drink, food, The Snowman, and many fun Christmas festivities.

I got a light tent, as a Christmas present from my mum, and its really helped with taking photos. I need one more light, to diffuse the shadows, but otherwise its really made a different to my photo taking. No more yellow images!

I actually have a back log of far more interesting and newer toys than FOC Starscream, but he is the one Transformer figure that I got for Christmas so he is the one most fresh in my mind.

Masterpiece Bluestreak, Smokescreen, Generations Hoist, Thundercracker, Classic Turtles and a load of other things are all sitting here, waiting to be reviewed. But right now, Starscream is top of the pile by virtue of being the newest.

Generations Starscream was released at the end of last year, in the US. However, Hasbro UK did not feel the later waves of Generations were worthy enough to import to us on these shores – so we initially did not get them over here. Yaaaay.

At some point towards the later part of 2013 Toys R Us appeared to get their hands on some US stock, and it would be great if they could do it more often. This is most probably stuff they could not shift in the US, so was bumped over to us – charming.

This wave includes the aforementioned Starscream, Ultra Magnus, Kickback, Sideswipe and Air Raid – all based on designs from the Fall of Cybertron video game. Which itself is the sequel to War For Cybertron, which offers a slightly different take on the pre earth G1 continuity.

I say this, because by default I take the FOC characters as updates of pre Earth G1, even though Hasbro says they are part of the aligned continuity – which makes them technically part of the Transformers Prime storyline.
But I don’t think many people really take much note of that, as the characters all look, sound and behave far more like their G1 Counterparts than they do Transformers Prime.

Personally, I think the game makers thought of it as G1, whilst Hasbro were trying to shoe horn it into Prime, unnecessarily.

Hit "READ FULL REVIEW" below, to see the full review, after the jump

Transformers MP-11 Masterpiece Starscream Reissue Review

I will get an apology in now - this is going to be a very long review. I was going to save it until after Christmas, when I will have small light tent which should really improve the quality of the photo's I take.

The Nexus 4's camera is fantastic in glorious sunlight, but anything less and it struggles. However, being as I injured my knee playing football and am pretty bored, I decided to pass the time by reviewing this guy.

MP-11 was released at some point back in 2012, and at the time I seem to remember it being a divisive figure. It was a remold of the Masterpiece Seeker toy but with a raft of improvements that made it more cartoon accurate, and made for a better figure.

However, these changes removed the much maligned hip kibble and also made it slightly less accurate to a real world F-15 Eagle jet fighter.

Obviously, that mold has its fans but I am not one of them. First off, the hip kibble looked horrible, and it was a nightmare to Transform at times. I only had the Hasbro Skywarp release, but it felt like such a low quality figure, being fragile and cheap feeling. 

So when MP 11 came out, I was far more impressed whilst other people were underwhelmed being as they owned a version of the mold several times over - people don't like to pay to replace expensive things.

Initially I skipped it as I my previous interaction with the Masterpiece Seeker mold was not great - but its price soon sky rocketed on the secondary market and everyone who skipped it soon came to regret it.

A year and half went by, and out of the blue Takara announced a limited reissue which sent people crazy, and scrambling to get a pre-order in, which proved handy when rumours circulated that Takara had cut its production by up to 50%!

So now I have the figure, does it really improve up the previous mold?

Hit "READ FULL REVIEW" below, to see the full review, after the jump

Fansproject City Commander Armour KO Review

                                                         He really can't deal with that right now

A couple of years back, I picked up a Knock Off of the Fansproject City Commander Armour set. It was really cheap, and intrigued me enough to pick it up whereas usually I don't really bother with KO's.

The thing was, I did not have a Classics Ultra Magnus for it to go on, and as he was ridiculously expensive on the secondary market at the time, it meant I ended up picking up a KO of that figure too. Oh how that was a mistake, and it ended up ruining my enjoyment of the set, and meant it was pretty much shoved to the back of a shelf and never touched again.

See, the Ultra Magnus KO I had looked really nice in pictures, and it was very cheap - but the quality was awful. It came in truck mode, and the first than that happened, was lightly trying to fold one of the cab sections - it snapped clean off.

It was not like I was bending it, or forcing it - it was just too weak. Then attaching the armour to the Magnus figure, other problems started to present themselves. KO Magnus's back section doesn't sit quite right in robot mode, which meant the chest of the City Commander would not sit right over the top of it. The shoulder pieces on the KO are not tight anyway, but on a KO Magnus, they would just fall off. Its a shame, as I love that original Classics Voyager Prime mode, I don't think there has been a better Classics version yet.

It soured me to the whole set, even though it was my own fault, and I just sort of forgot about it.

Until this week, when out of the blue I managed to find a reasonably priced Official Classics Magnus on EBay which was promptly ordered.

The difference it makes to the KO armour is massive.

Hit "READ FULL REVIEW" below, to...well...do that, after the jump

Generations Fall of Cybertron Jazz and Sideswipe Review

The Generations line for a while pretty much seemed to turn into the Fall of Cybertron toyline. Hasbro obviously wanted to make figures based on the designs from the game, but did not believe them strong enough to support their own toyline - which is a pretty fair assumption.

I loved the game, not just because it was Transformers, but because it was a really good shooter. So I was happy to see they were making toys based upon it. Sadly, they were not great, suffering from being small, spindly, hollow and cheap feeling.

Its a shame, as the game designs looked great - but a lot of them were not translated into toy form very well. Jazz and Sideswipe are a case in point, where the in game models looked awesome and chunky, whilst the toys failed to match it and they look a bit different.

These two share the same mold, and as I got them at the same time I decided to just review them both together. There are a few big differences, which we will talk about, but there Sideswipe is mostly the Jazz figure with a few bits of remolding.

I will say now, they are not bad figures - but they are not great.

Jazz's paint colours, due to him being a pearly white, were really hard to get to show up on camera properly. I am getting a cheap camera light tent set up for Christmas, but in the meantime I had to make do with using the flash on the camera - sorry about that!