Now that I’ve had Blackout for a little bit, here’s my thoughts on him!
Overall, this figure is
spectacular!
Bot mode is very well articulated, even including a waist swivel (which I think is a first for Blackout figures), and gets Blackout’s proportions down great, especially with the chest. The lower set of windows actually fold away during transformation, which is awesome! I also found that, hidden under the outer panels on the arm, there’s folded up Gatling guns molded into the arms, which you can see in the movie when Blackout reaches for the Military servers to hack them!
Alt mode is enormous and tabs in super securely, it feels so much nicer than the SS one. The clean underside is also really impressive, and the hatch even opens! Definitely a contender for my favorite alt mode on a Transformer.
Blackout is also loaded with accessories - two Gatling guns that can store in alt mode, on his arms, or on his legs, two huge blast effects that plug into the Gatling guns or the chest gun, his rotor weapon (which actually is a part of the whole rotor in alt mode, an awesome part of transformation and the first time a Blackout figure has had an accurate rotor weapon!), and Scorponok! Scorponok has a metal core body and is very well articulated, he’s not quite in scale for MPMs but I think he scales fairly alright with Studio Series.
Even the paint work on Blackout is pretty impressive - there’s a lot of silver drybrushing on the dark gunmetal parts throughout the figure, with some silver and gold accents. They even picked out the small yellow bits above his eyebrows! This detail carries over to alt mode too, where they picked out all the small text and warnings, even the pilots’ names!
The only issue with Blackout that I have (and it seems that this isn’t an issue for most people), is that the swivel joints to move the arms inward and outward are just loose enough that they often don’t support the weight of the arms, especially when they’re holding some of the weapons. Like I said though, I haven’t seen anyone else have that with theirs, and it’s a pretty easily fixed issue.
Besides that one issue though, I have no complaints about Blackout! I think I might be using him in bot mode as SS Grindor from time to time too xD
