by King Kuuga » Tue Nov 10, 2020 1:04 am
- Motto: "Yesssssssss....."
- Weapon: High Energy MASER Cannons
My Studio Series Devastator box set arrived (again much earlier than I was expecting it, so I don't have a spot set aside for it) and....... boy do I have some thoughts.
Despite coming packaged almost ready to assemble, I still wound up spending an hour or more trying to figure out just how to configure Scavenger and Mixmaster. I did finally get the big boy assembled and he's visually impressive but a bit difficult to balance. And he seems not to have knees. It does kind of fit for this incarnation of Devastator to be less than the sum of his parts though.
That process took me so long, I had to come back to it today to do the robot and alt modes. Once again, Scavenger is absolute torture, but this is only partially due to his actual design, part of it is also the godawful instructions in this set. I've been playing with Transformers for at least 23 years of my life. My first ever figure was Beast Wars Megatron. I'm no slouch at this, I can feel my way around a transformer, but Scavenger is a confusing mess and his instructions are the worst thing I have EVER read, and that's if you ignore the steps that are blatantly out of order. Maybe it's because he's such an abstract design that it's hard to determine which way is up that I struggled with him, but I had the worst time with those two arms that attach to his top wheel, and the swivel they sit on.
Also, when I got them to robot modes, I discovered my Hightower is missing his head. So that's just great.
When they're in robot modes, they're...... okay, I guess. Some are better than others, naturally, but boy did some of these look a lot better in the packaging. Articulation is iffy across the board. I always hear about how Studio Series is better than WFC but between the Bumblebee figures and this set I'm REALLY not seeing it. And yes, I respect that WFC and Studio Series are trying to replicate very different aesthetics but while those old ROTF toys may not have been perfect, they had some charm and prove you can make good toys from these designs. (The individual ones at least, the combining Devastator is junk.) Also, hollow parts and corner cutting really show in the robot modes. I don't usually let it bother me but the flimsy feeling on a lot of these guys is unsetting considering how they move around.
Vehicle modes are fine. This might be Scavenger's best mode, the way they handled the wheels is clever, even if I'm still partial to how the old ROTF voyager did it. It's a design that never made sense in the movies, where the heck to these giant wheels come from, so I can give them a pass for struggling to replicate it on the toy front. Overload is a bit disappointing, his vehicle mode is so stiff and the dump truck bucket isn't hollow. I guess I expected... more.
THey're not bad figures but the limitation of retail price points and just how much that price is being jacked up from what they really cost to produce is on full display here. I feel ripped off paying $250 for this set.
I was going to post pictures but I'm feeling extremely burnt out by a lot of things so I'll go back and add them later.
