Monday, February 18, 2013

Fantastic voyage

I've bought a lot of voyager-class TFs lately. It started with the Generations FoC Soundwave I got a few weeks ago. Then, last weekend, I found his remold, FoC Blaster. This past Saturday, I found the Beast Hunters Voyagers Optimus and Predaking for the first time. Finally, yesterday I found Blaster's wavemate, FoC Grimlock.

I'm actually trying to decide about taking Grimlock back to the store; I feel a bit guilty about spending even more money on TFs after getting so many recently. As such, he's still in package in my car along with the receipt.

Anyhow, Blaster is pretty awesome, being a really good example of remold. Even right next to Soundwave, it's not too obvious that they are the same basic toy. Unfortunately, his databot (?) partner is Steeljaw, which is a Ravage remold. Now, Ravage, which I got back over New Year's, is not great, but it does fold up well into disc mode and has a great deco. Steeljaw has neither of these features going for him, being made of cheap-looking yellow and white plastic and having a disc mode that does not have a flush surface. And, of course, he inherits all the problems that Ravage has. But, overall, Blaster is very much worth the cost. It's a good mold, though I  wouldn't own all three versions (I've passed over Soundblaster/Buzzsaw).

Predaking is interesting. He has some really awesome design/transformation features and some fairly obvious deficits. But overall he looks really good in both modes and basically does what he's supposed to do. I'll discuss him further in a mini-review later on.

Optimus Prime is a horse of a different color. This is easily one of the best voyager class Optimus Prime toys we've gotten in a long, long time. While it is recognizably an update to Optimus' TFP body, it manages to homage many other iterations of Optimus from across the years. It's also one of the best Voyager OPs in terms of being a toy; the figure is simply very fun.

I'll have to get back to you on Grimlock.

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