random impressions of new Prime toys

[Dominic]

Man, Lewis buys toys. Last night, his living room looked like a convention dealers set up. (On a related note, his display rooms are getting ever more cramped.)

Lewis had a significant number of Japanese Prime toys. Aside from Breakdown, which is not being released in the US, I am not sure that any of them are different enough from the US releases to make it worth paying import fees unless you really like the MInicons or some other thing about the Japanese toys.

Knock-Out with Energon Driller:
Sets like this make the Legends scale worthwhile. It would be difficult to engineer, manufactur and sell a scaled driller for the Deluxe figures, or even Scouts to ride on. But, at the Lgends scale, it works nicely. The drill tank has a light up, and spinning, drill. Pulling a switch causes it to unfold in to an attack/defense mode. Worth getting, but reported to be short-packed.

Wheeljack with Star Hammer:
Along with the driller, this might be the first ship/playset in TF that is actually scaled to the figures. Zab was pretty sure that the Hammer was shown to be a one man ship on the cartoon, making this set correctly sized. Like the driller, it has push-button lights and an attack mode. The Wheeljack figure is not as good as the Knock-Out figure, but is still acceptable as a Legend.


Optimus Maximus:
This toy is beyond terrible. It runs a bit more than $30 USD, compared to ~$20 for the above described vehicles. And, it does much less. it is a giant battle suit that looks like Optimus Prime. The best way to descibe it is that it is similar to something that Mattel would make for its superhero line. And, that is arguably being too hard on Mattel. The shoulder articulation would have been offensive 15 years ago and the hips are just articulated enough to accentuate how poorly articulated the shoulders are, but not enough to do much else. I am tempted to buy an Anakin/Vader SWTF figure to compare and see which is truly worse.


Dom
-likely skipping "Prime" altogether.

[Mako Crab]

Cool about the driller and hammer. Not shocking about Optimus Maximus. That thing looked terrible in every picture I ever saw of it.

[JediTricks]

Optimus Maximus looks worse than I expected in person and at stores. The cardboard Optimus Prime in the middle really screams "overblown budget" but the toy itself shows no real budget at all, it's just a loose cage of nothingness looking like OP himself. Making all the limbs cages is really bad too because then it's not even a power suit, it's just a hollow mess that's basically an overpriced carrying case.