Tag Archives: War For Cybertron: Siege

#1996: Sideswipe

Posted by Ethan Wilson in Reviews and tagged with , , , ,

SIDESWIPE

TRANSFORMERS WAR FOR CYBERTRON: SIEGE (HASBRO)

In my trek into the world of Transformers, I’m kind of making my way through all of the standard classes.  I looked a Voyager Class first with Optimus, then followed that up with some Leader coverage with Magnus and Shockwave.  With the second wave of Siege product hitting right at this very minute, I’m going back and doing a little bit of catch-up, and jumping into the Deluxe Class with today’s focus, Sideswipe!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Sideswipe is one of the four figures in the first Deluxe Wave of War for Cybertron: Siege figures.  Like the rest of the line so far, he’s heavily influenced by his G1 design, which is really about as prominent as Sideswipe gets.  In his robot mode, the figure stands 5 inches tall and has 20 workable points of articulation.  Where many of the Siege figures are worn-in and battle-torn, Sideswipe’s robot mode is actually pretty clean and slick.  There’s some definite polish to the sculpt, and a lot of people have brought up that he almost looks like a mini-Masterpiece figure in this regard.  Still, as a lower price-point figure, there are some hollow sections of construction; the legs form in a way to conceal them, but the arms are just hanging out there.  Fortunately, the off-white plastic somewhat masks this issue, so he doesn’t end up looking too cheap. Sideswipe has a little bit of back-kibble where the roof of the car folds up on his back.  Like Optimus, it’s clearly there, but it’s svelte enough to not really ruin the figure’s silhouette.  Sideswipe’s original figure turned into a Lamborghini.  They obviously don’t have many of those around on Cybertron, so this figure instead turns into a slightly more generic Cybertronian sports car.  It’s not actually too far removed from Sideswipe’s usual alt-modes, but it fits the overall aesthetic of the line pretty well.  Sideswipes transformation into alt-mode was definitely the easiest of all the Siege figures I’ve picked up.  It’s quite intuitive, and not as involved as some of the others, making swapping him back and forth a rather easy endeavor.  Despite the simplicity of the transformation, the alt-mode is still a very nice piece in its own right.  It matches the robot for sleekness and holds together well.  Sideswipe is packed with two blasters, the W-10 Photo-Pulser Proton Launcher and the W-5 Gyro Blaster, which can be combined into the RR Gyrofuse Axleswitch Hyper-Blaster.  They can be held in his hands, or mounted on his shoulders, depending on your fancy.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

Sideswipe was almost my first Siege figure.  When All Time first got in the deluxes in December, I came very close to buying him, but he ended up selling before I had the opportunity.  When the second round of them arrived in January, I had already gotten Optimus, but I felt like maybe the moment had passed.  You know, like a fool.  He ended up coming home with me a few weeks later, because I just kept finding myself looking at him.  I’m glad I bought one, because oh boy is he a nice figure, and a nice car.  I think this is the most I’ve enjoyed both forms of a Transformer.

As mentioned above, I picked this guy up from my friends at All Time Toys, where he is still currently in stock here.  If you’re looking for Transformers, or other toys both old and new, please check out their website and their eBay storefront.

#1961: Shockwave

Posted by Ethan Wilson in Reviews and tagged with , , , , ,

SHOCKWAVE

TRANSFORMERS WAR FOR CYBERTRON: SIEGE

You didn’t think I was done with the Transformers reviews, did you?  Of course not, that would be preposterous.  The Transformers are my new life.  They give, they take, and I am merely their humble servant…wait, no that doesn’t quite sound right, does it?  Joking aside, Transformers sure do have a way of forcing themselves into a collection.  They’re a little like potato chips: you can’t have just one (unless you’re me and you don’t actually like potato chips all that much.  I’m weird).  Fortunately, for all of us who feel an undying need for multitudes of Transformers, Hasbro has a tendency to release multiples of them, all at the same time.  Crazy, I know.  I’m mixing things up a bit today and taking a look at a prominent Decpticon fixture, Shockwave!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Shockwave is the second of the two figures in the first Leader Class wave of the War For Cybertron: Siege line. The line is very definitely G1-inspired, and so is Shockwave…after a fashion.  I’ll get to that in a moment.  Right out of the box, in his fully-kitted robot mode, Shockwave stands just shy of 7 inches tall from his feet to the top of his head, and he has 30 points of practical articulation.  Shockwave’s out of the box design takes his G1 appearance and sort of amplifies it.  He gets a lot pointier, and of course gets the extra arms as well.  It’s a decent, rather menacing sort of look, and further adds the that inhuman charm of Shockwave.  As we saw with Ultra Magnus, Shockwave is full of a lot of small detail work, which makes him a little more kibbly than the very clean Optimus figure, though it certainly works for Shockwave.  Shockwave may lack the traditional face, but that doesn’t mean Hasbro skimped on the detailing on the head.  It’s chock full of details, and, most impressively, features lightpiping to keep that single eye constantly bright.  So, where does the G1-inspiration hit?  Well, like Magnus, Shockwave is at his core a Voyager-sized figure, with extra attachments meant to bump him up to the Leader size.  While Magnus’ armor transforms him into an almost completely different figure, Shockwave’s extra parts just enhance the base figure.  You can remove the shoulers/extra arms, the backpack, and the “shoes”, and you’re left with a figure that’s a rather spot-on recreation of the original Shockwave.  The resultant figure is a lot more basic, and will slot right in with Voyager-sized figures such as Optimus.  The extra armored parts can then be re-formatted into a goblin glider-looking thing, so they aren’t just sitting in a pile in a corner, like Magnus’ are when he’s stripped down.  Because of this, I find myself most drawn to this configuration for the character.  Of course, the distinction between these two modes is far less drastic than it was on Magnus, meaning switching between them is also a far simpler process.

From his stripped down robot mode, you can transform Shockwave into his next alt-mode.  Like his leader Megatron, Shockwave’s G1 toy transformed into a gun.  With current safety standards, this is less feasible in a modern market, and would result in detrimental changes to the entire figure.  So, Shockwave does *not* turn into a gun, but is rather a Cybertronian battle cruiser of some sort.  In his stripped down form, this cruiser looks vaguely like a submarine, I suppose.  Oh drat, I seem to have left it flipped over for my photo.  Well, would you look at that, it seems to look vaguely gun-shaped when flipped over.  That’s crazy.  Certainly, this is just a coincidence, since Shockwave *doesn’t* turn into a gun.  If, by chance, someone were to try and use this as a gun, I would note that the handle does seem kind of small for the average collector’s hands.  But they definitely wouldn’t be using it as a gun.  Because it’s not.  It’s a submarine–no, sorry, Cybertronian battle cruiser.  For his next mode, you can add the various armor pieces into the mix, which gives the build some wings, thrusters, and more pronounced front end, all of which make for a more distinctly battle cruiser-looking shape.  It’s actually a pretty cool design in its own right, and of the three I’ve looked at so far, this one does seem to have the alt-mode that most fully embraces the Cybertronian vehicle aesthetic.  Shockwave lacks any addition weaponry, but given the ability of the armor to go into the drone/glider configuration, he still feels decently armed.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

This one is once again Max’s fault, but I’m willing to give him a little more of a pass.  After I agreed to pick up his Ultra Magnus, he also found Shockwave elsewhere.  In this particular instance, he said he was prepared to take the second Shockwave, but I was, at this point, starting to feel a little more committed to the idea of grabbing a Shockwave of my own.  I don’t have quite the connection to Shockwave that I do to Magnus, and of the two, Magnus is undoubtedly my favorite.  I feel like he warrants the Leader Class treatment a bit more than Shockwave.  Shockwave definitely feels more like a more basic figure with some extras thrown in than a full-fledged higher tier offering.  That being said, there’s still a lot more to this figure than there would be at the Voyager price-point, and I don’t feel like he was overpriced.  He may be my third favorite of the three I have from this line, but that’s not a shot at him in the slightest.

I picked up Shockwave from my friends All Time Toys.  If you’re looking for Transformers, or other toys both old and new, please check out their website and their eBay storefront.

#1960: Ultra Magnus

Posted by Ethan Wilson in Reviews and tagged with , , , ,

ULTRA MAGNUS

TRANSFORMERS WAR FOR CYBERTRON: SIEGE

Well, I started this month off with a Transformers review; might as well finish it with one.  I know, another Transformers review, and so soon after the last one.  I’m blowing your minds, aren’t I?  Okay, probably not, because I’m a little bit predictable, and I very clearly spelled out at the end of my Optimus Prime review that I really wanted a bunch more.  Getting a bunch more was kind of inevitable.  At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.  Today, I’m looking at the inevitable counterpart to any Optimus Prime, Ultra Magnus.  A prominent fixture of the brand since the G1 days, Magnus has many times been an easy way to get extra milage out of Optimus Prime/Convoy molds (and has, on one occasion, actually been related to Optimus in continuity).  And now, he’s my newest Transformer.  Yay!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Ultra Magnus is one of the two figures in the first Leader Class wave of War For Cybertron: Siege.  As with the others in this line, he’s very much G1 inspired, at least in his robot mode.  Said robot mode has Magnus standing 7 1/4 inches tall and gives him 20 practical points of articulation.  He may not be quite as mobile as Prime, but he sure is chunkier.  I mean, like a lot chunkier.  Magnus’s gimmick back in the G1 days was that his main look was the result of a bunch of armor pieces that all assembled over the much smaller inner-bot, a gimmick that this figure brings back, for the first time since the original, in fact.  The fully assembled look is what gives Magnus his more distinctive character, and clips in place and holds together like it were just a fixed part of the figure.  It’s also designed to attach in such a way that it doesn’t really hinder the figure’s movement all too much when he’s all kitted out.  Obviously, the sheer bulk causes a slight limiting factor, but he’s still quite posable.  Where Optimus’s main look was made up of lots of clean lines, Magnus is a little more complicated and fractured, which is ultimately pretty true to the two respective characters.  There’s plenty of small detail work going on here, and I particularly dig all of the little intricacies of the armored parts.  The armored-up look results in a very chunky silhouette, especially when viewing Magnus from the side, but this feels pretty true to the character.  It’s at the very least a consistent bulk, so there’s no random bits of his vehicle mode just jutting out of the back.

When it comes to alt-modes, Magnus has not one, not two, but three.  The first one (which you’ll need to transform him into in order get to the other two) strips him of his distinctive Ultra Magnus armor, revealing an almost all-white Optimus Prime-looking figure, with some blue accents, just like Magnus’ original figure.  It’s *not* the a re-use of the Voyager Class Optimus, which is somewhat surprising, and actually kind of cool.  How often does Magnus get to be the original?  The mold has already been tagged for a Leader Class Optimus, set to be released over the summer, but Magnus gets to be unique until then.  It’s a solid sculpt of its own.  I really appreciate the differences between this and the Voyager Optimus.  There are a few oddities I’m iffy about, like the front wheels just sticking off of the back, and there being a few rather obvious screws, but it’s still a pretty well-crafted figure.  Ultimately, I can’t see myself displaying him this way anyway, so it’s not like it’s a big deal.  Switching between armored and unarmored is pretty easy, and even a relative novice like me didn’t have any real trouble.

Ultra Magnus’ next mode is his primary vehicle mode, which, it should be noted, is the one bit of this figure that’s *not* G1-inspired.  He still turns into a truck cab, but this one is very clearly modeled on Magnus’ vehicle design from the 2001 Robots in Disguise cartoon.  Seeing as that cartoon was my introduction to Magnus, I can definitely dig it.  Magnus’ transformation into truck felt a lot easier to me than Optimus’, though I’d imagine that’s to prep you for what comes next.

After removing his armor and transforming him into a truck, the third alt-mode has you add the armor back on, this time in the form of the truck’s trailer.  This set-up also follows the RiD model, though it keeps the colors of the G1, obviously.  I found this portion of the transformation to be the most difficult, as there are a lot of bits that all need to clip together, and they had a tendency to fight me and not want to go where they were supposed to.  Fortunately, they come back apart without too much trouble.  Magnus is armed with three different styles of weapon.  He’s got his RT-15 Stethoscopic Detector (the rifle), a pair of C-30 Magnetic Inducer Launchers (the smaller guns), and a pair of W-HV-1000 Simulacrum Blasters (the rockets on his shoulders).  They’re all using the 5mm ports, so they can be held or plugged in various places, and they are also compatible with the effects included with the battle masters.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

This is Max’s fault again.  At first it was less Max’s fault, because how was he to know that I’ve always had a soft spot for Magnus, and specifically a soft spot for RiD Magnus, and that mentioning the RiD-inspired truck would lead me to want this figure.  Then it became more Max’s fault when he decided to buy his Magnus early from another store, and volunteered me to buy the one on order for him from All Time “since I was planning on grabbing one anyway.” I mean, yeah, I was, but is that really the point?  …Okay, yes it is, but, still.  Whatever the circumstances that led to me getting Magnus, I’m very happy to have him in my collection, and I even more look forward to getting more of these guys.

So, as you may have guessed, I picked up Magnus from All Time Toys.  If you’re looking for Transformers, or other toys both old and new, please check out their website and their eBay storefront.

#1933: Optimus Prime

Posted by Ethan Wilson in Reviews and tagged with , , , , ,

OPTIMUS PRIME

TRANSFORMERS WAR FOR CYBERTRON: SIEGE (HASBRO)

Oh wow, what’s this?  Another Transformers review?  On this little old site?  But it’s only been a day since the last one!  Is that enough of a waiting period?  I wouldn’t want people to think I might be some sort of *shudder* Transformers fan…

Well, if I’m gonna commit to this potential Transformers fan thing, I’ve got one pretty big hurdle I’m gonna need to overcome.  You see, in my over two decades of collecting, I have never once owned a single figure of the most definitive Transformer of all time, Optimus Prime.  Yeah, I don’t know how that happened either.  Well, I mean, I might; it could possibly be related to me exclusively buying figures of Soudwave.  That might have done it.  Whatever the case, I’m striving to make up for this horrible gaping hole in my collection.  So, without further ado, here’s Optimus Prime!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Optimus is part of the first wave of Voyager Class releases for Hasbro’s new War For Cybertron: Siege line, where he was paired off with his Decepticon equivalent Megatron.  In his robot mode, Optimus stands 6 1/2 inches tall and he has 26 practical points of articulation.  This figure is sporting a brand new sculpt, patterned on the original G1 Optimus, or at least a very idealized version of it.  This Optimus aims to be the figure Transformers fans *remember* playing with, rather than the one the actually did…unless your me, and this figure actually *is* the figure you were playing with.  That’s not the point, though.  I was quite impressed by the implementation of the articulation on this figure; it’s easily on par with Legends and the like, at least in terms of range.  All of the joints are free and clear to do as they please, and a lot of them are very cleverly hidden on this guy.  His sculpt is boxy, and very full of small detail work, but not so much that it ruins that nice clean-lined feel of the classic Optimus design.  I particularly dig the rivets on the upper arms, as well as the transparent windows of the cab.  And, though there is no separate Matrix of Leadership included with this figure (thought he shape of one is hinted behind the windows when he’s in vehicle mode), the torso is clearly designed with the possibility of housing one in mind. Part of the slickness of this particular figure’s robot mode comes from how it handles the kibble on the back.  The remnants of his truck cab fold up into a rather compact and manageable back pack piece, and the headlights on the arms, though a bit more noticeable, still can be passed off as forearm guards.  Optimus’s alt-mode is a smoke-stack-sporting truck reminiscent of his original incarnation’s freight truck.  It’s been slightly Cybertron-ized, since I guess these figures are technically supposed to be pre-Earth, but it’s still very clear where the influence lies.  I find the cab of the truck in particular to be the most convincing piece.  The back looks a little more like it’s just his legs flipped around, since that’s kinda what it is and all.  I will say, that although there are technically more steps to the process of transforming this guy, I did find it as a whole a much easier experience, and am much more willing to swap Prime back and forth on a frequent basis.  He’s still going to be staying a robot most of the time, of course, but I see this one being a figure I pick up and fiddle with more frequently.  Optimus is packed with two accessories: a blaster and an axe.  The blaster is pretty straight-forward piece, and can be held in his hand in robot mode, or mounted in one of the handful of 5mm ports when in truck mode.  The axe is slightly more complex, with a transformation of its own.  Out of the the package, it’s an axe, but you can also fold it up into a shield, which, like the blaster, can be mounted in one of the 5mm ports.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

I blame Max.  No, really, it’s all Max’s fault.  I wasn’t into Transformers, I swear.  Okay, so, it’s a little bit Max’s fault, and a little bit Bumblebee‘s fault.  Max was really up-selling this figure to me, and I was trying to hold out.  And then I saw Bumblebee, with it’s classically-styled Optimus in all his classically-styled glory, and I thought “man, I need an Optimus.”  I was at All Time, I’d just traded in a bunch of stuff for store credit, they only had one of this guy in stock, and I was sort of having a bad day, so I just sort of grabbed him.  I don’t regret that choice for a second, because man is this a cool toy.  Like, even overlooking the transforming feature, he’s just a strong base figure, and a ton of fun to mess around with.  The only downside is that now I really want a bunch more.

As mentioned above, I picked this guy up from my friends at All Time Toys.  The first wave of Voyager Class Siege figures have sold out, but the Deluxe figures are still in-stock, and they’ll be carrying all of the new releases as they come.  If you’re looking for Transformers, or other toys both old and new, please check out their website and their eBay storefront.