Wolfman Jake wrote:william-james88 wrote:Ironhidensh wrote:Picked up Chromia for my son today, and of course, I had to play with it a bit as well.
Hot damn, this figure sucks. Nice robot mode, but the car mode, and most especially, the transformation to car mode, is incredibly lame.
Thats because they removed 2 of its 4 modes. It makes more sense when the mold can also be used as a combiner limb.
Even if they weren't going to let Siege Chromia be Combiner Wars/Power of the Primes compatible, they could have done a little more to her to give her a "hideen" third mode, a la Soundwave. Something that could configure her into a nice BFG for Orthia/Elita Infin1te to wield would have made that bitter pill a lot easier to swallow. And "weaponizing" Chromia as such wouldn't have been out of step with the rest of the Siege line either. I tried to find a good fan mode for Chromia as such a Combiner Targermaster, but nothing really does the job to me satisfaction.
My beef with the Chromia mold is how it handled her altmode kibble in robot mode. While stowing it all away similar in concept to that of the Moonracer mold, the Chromia mold just does it so much worse.
First off, the kibble on her legs just hangs off from her shins. On the Moonracer mold, this kibble was better integrated with each leg, and extended forwardly from each leg. With Chromia, this kibble is instead a set of separate pieces pinned into each leg and set further back on her legs so that, when each piece is rotated to rest again the length of her legs, these pieces keep hitting her thighs whenever her legs are bent at the knee, obstructing her leg articulation. The only way to avoid this is to instead have her kibble pieces rotated to extend away from her legs, which just looks bad.
And then there is her backpack. While the Moonracer mold had a pretty sizable backpack of its own, the Chromia mold's backpack is even bigger, all because they gave her ordinary feet when the Moonracer mold's feet transformed into part of her altmode's windshield, and so that part of Chromia's windshield went into her backpack mass with everything else.
It's like they had designed Chromia's robot mode first and with almost no altmode parts anywhere on her (her arms are the only place on her robot mode on which altmode parts can be found fully integrated into her robot mode body), and then realized that she still had to be able to transform into something and so built her altmode around her robot mode almost completely separate from it, and then tacked it on to her robot mode as an afterthought.
And another knock against the figure just happened tonight: Her belt keeps popping off.