From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Deluxe Wave 29

Starscream (TF One Cybertronian jet)
Constructicon Scavenger (TFtM power shovel)
Concept Art KSI Widow (AoE sportscar)
Elita-1 (TF One Cybertronian motorcycle)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/Deluxe29

This was a weird wave, with Arcee being put on pre-order way back in
2025 and ending up the last one to actually ship. My pre-orders trickled in over a span of several months. Because of my preference for waiting until
the whole wave is reviewed before posting, I wrote the Scavenger review weeks before Arcee arrived, as I wanted to figure out the Devastator mode elements prior to opening the Commander set and seeing the instructions. Notes on
where I was right or wrong are in that review:
http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/Commander2025

Note, I think I need a shorthand for an increasingly common problem with transformations, where it's clear they made sense at the design phase and
might have worked fine with a hand-adjusted prototype, but the tolerances of manufacturing were not up to the task of getting everything right. Perhaps a tab is a tiny bit misaligned and can't go into its slot, or a hinge doesn't bend quite far enough, or a pin is driven a tiny bit incorrectly so things can't connect properly. Currently toying with WIRNIR, or Worked In Render,
Not In Reality.


CAPSULES

$25 price point.

Starscream: Nice-looking robot mode, very complex transformation that
has a bad case of WIRNIR, vehicle mode that would be okay if it didn't pop seams and tabs. Mildly recommended for the robot mode, as I suspect this is
a QC roulette where every space is 0 or 00.

Constructicon Scavenger: Some issues with joints that are too hard to move, and a mild case of WIRNIR, but otherwise a decent update. It has the advantage of a simple and blocky design that doesn't require too much to translate from screen into toy, unlike the rest of this wave. Recommended.

KSI Widow: Yeah, she got the WIRNIR bad, although unlike with Starscream
I was able to eventually get all the panels in place with the use of a
knife. At least on mine, the sockets meant to store the weapons in vehicle mode are too small and the weapons end up coming loose and fitting wherever. Interesting concept, mediocre execution. Mildly recommended.

Elita-1: A reasonably clever design that feels like it stopped a little short of working properly, definitely WIRNIR-adjacent in a few places, but
more in ways that make it harder to play with in vehicle mode as opposed to hard to get it into vehicle mode in the first place. It also has the dubious honor of being the only "proper" toy of a main character from TFOne that
we're likely to get. With slightly better luck on tab and slot tolerances, this would be an easy Recommended, but it seems like I had a fairly typical sample, so I'd put this as mildly recommended but second best of the wave.


RANTS

Packaging: Same window-box style seen in wave 28. As with other 2025 Constructicons, the left side has art of Devastator rather than of the figure inside the box.
As usual, the TF One figures have faction symbols on the packaging, but not on the actual toys because during that movie the factions hadn't been founded yet.


DECEPTICON (sort of): STARSCREAM
Assortment: G0566
Altmode: Cybertronian Jet
Transformation Difficulty: 30 steps (uh oh)
Previous Name Use: Yes
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: TF One
Scene: High Guard Secret Base

STARSCREAM leads High Guard fighting corruption from the shadows.

I would've said "the High Guard" or even "survivors of the High Guard" myself...were they under a strict letter limit?

Note, this is going to be one of those times I review the vehicle mode
and then go back to review the robot mode, because the transformation is annoying enough that I don't want to do it again. Too much WIRNIR.

Packaging: Four ties hold the robot to the inner tray, and the one that goes across the upper body also holds a plastic shield piece over the chest. The tissue bundle in the lower right holds the Null Rays, the stubby jet
tail, and the underbody cannon for vehicle mode. Note, the tail doesn't need to come off during transformation, this was one of those "figure would need a deeper box" situations.
The screenshot is of Starscream standing in his junky base, and the backdrop is a darkened cityscape.

Robot Mode: One of the skinnier Starscream designs to pop up since Prime ended, and they really leaned into the high heels design of the feet here.
This Starscream is a bit of a dandy, part of the old aristocracy who found himself on the outs with the new upstart running things. While he hasn't yet become the scheming opportunist of G1, he's definitely on that path and his design reflects a sort of faded heroism...all of his colors are muted, where
he once might've been a heroic red, white, and blue his white is a dingy brownish light gray, and the other colors are desaturated, to reflect his current status as lord of a junkheap. They might even have been shooting for
a "yellowed plastic" look. Oh, and he has plump lips and a molded soul patch sort of beard that isn't painted differently.
5.25" (13cm) tall at the head, almost 6" (15cm) to the tops of the wings when they're in the official configuration. Colors as noted above, plus very dark gray and dark gunmetal. Desaturated red plastic is used for the chestplate, abdomen front, hips, and the scoops on the backpack flanking the head. Slightly desaturated medium-light blue plastic is used for the forearms/fists, toes, back of calf panels, and the pistol. Dark gunmetal plastic is found on the neck, elbow joints, thighs, backpack core (mostly hidden), heels, and Null Ray cannons. Light warm gray (sort of a light sandstone or concrete color) plastic is used for the shoulderpads, upper
arms, the rest of the backpack, wings, shins, and some other mostly hidden stuff inside the torso. I don't know what color plastic the head is, as it's completely painted, but it might be dark gunmetal plastic that they decided needed to be just a little darker and more metallic.
The head is painted a sort of obsidian shiny black all over the helmet part, with silver face and gloss deep red eyes. A dark gunmetal that's a decent match for the plastic (if a bit shinier) is used for the inner
forearms neat the wrist, bits on the hip joints to make the thighs look a little longer, the intake vents on the chest, and details on top of the
toes. It's also extensively used on the wings and weapons as described under vehicle mode. The shins are painted bright blue that's glossier than the plastic but otherwise a good match. The collarbone area on the upper torso
is painted light warm gray, a good match to the plastic. The abdomen cockpit is painted copper with a roof of light warm gray. They didn't try to come up with a High Guard symbol to put on him in lieu of the symbol that was still just Megatronus's personal emblem at this point in history.
The neck is a ball joint with the socket inside the head, but there is
no waist joint due to how the transformation works...even if there was a
swivel there, the cockpit abdomen would keep it from moving. Ball joint shoulders with independently hinged shoulderpads, swivels above the hinge elbows, no wrist articulation. Ball joint hips with upper thigh swivels,
hinge knees that can almost bend double (and do bend double for
transformation when you open the blue panels on the backs of the boots). No ankle articulation, so despite the big thruster heels (nozzles pointed backwards rather than down) the figure is prone to tipping over backwards. Technically the toes can be made to point further down, but they snap into place and other angles are not stable.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, there's 5mm sockets high up on the outer faces of the shoulderpads, and a 3mm socket on the underside of the groin.
The tail section on the backpack has a rectangular slot that's used to store the belly gun.
The belly gun is an awkward assemblage of barrels (three long, one
short) on a strut that's supposed to represent a gun that drops down out of
the fuselage for attacks and can be retracted otherwise, an element borrowed from the Bumblebee Movie Starscream. Instead of a 5mm peg grip, it has a rectangular tab that can be held in a 5mm socket or full-circle fist socket, and also goes into a slot in the tail. The attachment method in vehicle mode is really a hassle and involves channels in the root of the strut part that wrap around tabs on the undersides of the shoulderpads (which fold open along some hinges to fit on the underside of vehicle mode).
The instructions show you can remove the stubby tail from its 5mm socket on the back and use it as another gun, which looks even worse than the belly gun as a hand weapon. I recommend just leaving it in place, and if you don't want to just toss the belly gun, leave that attached to the tail on the back.
Fortunately, Starscream gets his shoulder-mounted Null Ray cannons, although they're kinda skinny and a little on the short side. They're identical to each other, 1.75" (a little over 4cm) long with 5mm pegs on the sides near one end, and otherwise never thicker than 4mm in diameter or
thinner than 2mm. Neither end is 3mm, so no Fire Blasts except for the ones with long enough sockets that they can get to the part of the barrel that's
3mm wide (most are not deep enough). They can also be held as pistols, but there's no forearm sockets, so it's upper shoulders or hands.

Transformation: Ugh. Not as bad as the BB Movie version, but still full of tabs that only fit when things are exactly correct and that will not help things STAY correct, so whatever order you try to get the tabs aligned in
will be wrong. I can't even get both calf panels to lock in place at the
same time, there's probably a tenth-of-a-millimeter assembly error somewhere. Additionally, the weapons need to be attached to and between the shoulderpads in the middle of transformation, if you try to put them on at the end the
Null Rays are tricky and the belly cannon is downright infuriating. Of
course, the belly gun is ugly even when attached correctly, so maybe just
toss it entirely.
Going back to robot mode, at least there isn't as much depending on weak tabs holding in their slots against the force of misaligned joints. There's still a lot of "no, that order is wrong too" stuff, especially getting the chest folded back up, and an issue where some of the pinned joints are so
stiff that snap-on parts will snap OFF while trying to bend the
transformation joint. The position of the folded up wings is a little arbitrary, since they're just held in place by joint friction rather than snapping into any sockets or slots.

Vehicle Mode: This is based on the Cybertronian altmode from the
Bumblebee movie with the Siege-style stubby tail but with swept-forwards
wings and a belly cannon, but tweaked a bit so this isn't just a retool or shrink-down of the #72 Starscream Voyager (or an upscale of the Core).
Neither is it just the Sentinel Prime altmode, despite a redeco of
Starscream's art being used on Sentinel Prime's box. In any case, it's definitely one of those designs that cheats BADLY in the animation, just
making parts vanish if they're inconvenient. Whenever they do that, Studio Series designers aren't allowed to just say screw it, they have to TRY, which is how a Deluxe got a 30 step transformation where most of the steps involve squeezing panels into place. Hence the annoying transformation that I don't want to do any more than absolutely necessary. That said, the retention of
the Siege-era thick tail does make the undercarriage legs and arms less jarring. Loads of weapons, with the Null Rays flanking the belly gun, three molded weapons on each wing, and that looks to be a rear-facing blaster on
the top of the tail. It's kinda sad that they went to the trouble of of molding a lot of thrusters and vents in back given that looking back there shows the robot fists just sitting there.
5.25" (13cm) long with a wingspan of just under 5" (12.5cm), the blue
and dark gray are de-emphasized but the colors are otherwise about the same
as robot mode. The nose tip that folds out of hiding for this mode is light warm gray plastic, as is most of the upper surface of the vehicle. The
cockpit section and the bit between the leading edges of the wings are red plastic, as are the thrusters atop the wings which are pulled back and apart
in this mode. Most of the blue plastic is only really visible from the Bad Angles (back and underneath), and the only dark gray plastic is the main thruster nozzles in back.
There's a little bit of full red paint on the sides of the nose to link
up the plastic colors, and a patch of it at the front of the tail fin root. Blue paint is used for stripes running along the tips of the wings and the trailing edges of the outer wing parts. The cockpit window is metallic
copper and the roof of it is painted in a pretty good match for the light
warm gray. Lots of dark gunmetal paint on every weapon detail except the
Null Rays (which are that color of plastic), plus on vent details on the
front of the thick tail, and stripes on the inner parts of the wings. The
air intakes are also dark gunmetal, and there's light warm gray paint on some details on the red piece that's at the front base of the tail. There's room for a Decepticon symbol on the wings and tail if you want to update his look
to the sequel that we probably won't be getting (sigh).
The 3mm socket from the pelvis is accessible in the back, and the fists are exposed. The rear-pointing barrel on the tail and the central barrel of the belly gun can hold 3mm-socket Fire Blasts. I checked, while at first glance it looks like some Fire Blasts might fit securely in the centers of
the main thrusters, they don't actually do so.
The wingtips are hinged from transformation so you can adjust whether
the wings are flat or angled up or down. No other intentional articulation, just "oops, that piece moved when it wasn't supposed to" stuff.

Overall: Good robot mode, frustrating transformation, and a vehicle mode that would be okay if it didn't require MUCH better tolerances than Hasbro is able to supply. As it stands, the vehicle mode tends towards gaps and parts refusing to stay connected. If you're willing to take a spin at QC roulette
in hopes of getting one that holds together, it's decent aesthetically, but I suspect the odds might not be in your favor.


DECEPTICON: CONSTRUCTICON SCAVENGER
Assortment: G0570
Combiner Component: 4 of 5
Altmode: Power Shovel
Transformation Difficulty: 15 steps
Previous Name Use: RotF, Studio (plus several without "Constructicon"
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: TFtM
Scene: Attack on Autobot City

SCAVENGER combines with other CONSTRUCTICONS to form DEVASTATOR

Packaging: Five ties hold the robot to the inner tray, two more hold the detached power shovel in the lower left (the instructions show four steps for attaching it), and a little tissue bag taped in the lower right has the
pistol. I guess they were worried just securing it with a tie might not work well?
Same "Devastator bodyslams Sludge" screenshot as Mixmaster, same Autobot shuttle interior background on the box back render.

Robot Mode: The proportions are a bit weird, with an extra-long pelvis
and hips situated a bit too low on it, in addition to short-looking legs made from the treads. As is usual for the character, his legs are entirely made
of treads, and the power shovel is folded up on the back but can do the scorpion stinger thing.
5.5" (14cm) tall like the rest of the limb Constructicons, in the usual "Constructicon green", dark purple, and black, with some silver. There's two types of purple plastic, a slightly duller and lighter variety used for the neck root, shoulder struts, outer pelvis, and thighs...basically places where there's a lot of joint-type stress. The darker and glossier purple plastic
is used for the tab down the middle of the pelvis front, the hips, the lower legs, and the feet. Black (well, very dark gray) plastic is used for the
head, the torso core, the fists (and that's gotta be a case of sprue
efficiency maximizing or something), and the pistol. The upper and lower
arms, the right and left torso, and the whole backpack including the shovel
are Constructicon green plastic.
The fists and the outer surface of the torso core are painted a somewhat bolder Constructicon green than the plastic, but when painting over black you kinda gotta go bold. The entire chest front piece (which is metal on the original G1 toy) is painted silver, as are the faceplate and the main drive wheel details on the hips and feet. The visor is dark red, there's a
gunmetal circle partly painted around the raised bit on the chest where the purple Decepticon symbol is printed, and the cab windows visible behind the left side of the back are painted dark purple. They used a lot of paint to keep to a simple animation-accurate color scheme.
The neck is functionally a swivel, but the transformation joint lets it tilt forwards a bit. The waist is locked in place, and technically doesn't even exist as a joint as the bottom of the abdomen is just touching the top
of the torso and locked down by that tab in the middle of the pelvis.
Nothing TO turn. Ball joint shoulders and elbows, wrists have inward hinges for transformation. Ball joint hips, upper thigh swivels, hinge knees that snap strongly into straight-leg pose and have filler pieces inside so that bending them looks like a proper joint, very stiff instep hinge ankles. The toes and heels technically fold down for transformation, but their short
length makes this a marginal source of useful articulation. The power shovel arm on the back has three hinges, a sort of shoulder/elbow/wrist combination, plus being attached via a peg it can rotate around what amounts to the upper arm. It has enough range to let Scavenger cover his face with the scoop to hide it when he gets too socially awkward.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs and the holes go all the way through,
there's a socket on the outer face of the right shoulder (but not the left,
as the cab would interfere with its utility in vehicle mode), one under each heel. The two bigger screw holes on the right side of the backpack are 5mm,
or close enough (the bottom one is a bit loose). Oddly, there is a 3mm stud
on the butt, rather than a 3mm socket...ah, it's for storing the pistol, although that bit got left out of the instructions. There's a couple of rectangular sockets on the back of the right boot which I suspect go onto
Hook in combiner mode to stabilize things.
The 1.75" (4.5cm) long pistol has a 3mm socket on the right side to go onto the butt peg, and a 4mm socket on the left side purely as a hollowness measure. It's not right-left symmetric, having a sort of energy clip hanging off the left side at an angle of about 30 degrees down from horizontal.
There's a sight on top that happens to be 3mm in diameter or close enough for
a rubbery Fire Blast, and the barrel ends in an intentional 3mm stud. The
grip is a fairly short 5mm peg, but the overall design ensures that the
forearm doesn't keep the peg from going into the fist all the way. If you don't like the intended storage for it, the grip goes nicely into the upper screw hole on the backpack.

Transformation: Simple in principle, but the way the cab is folded
behind the left torso does make for some tricky order-of-steps in both directions, and this is one of those tread-legs figures where the treads
need to wrap around the belt, so getting the belt sides to go into the appropriate hollow sections of the inner thighs can be difficult (also, it
took me way too long to realize this was one of Those Designs, I kept trying
to get it to work with the belt plate in back since that whole section is invisible in the package renders). You need to lift up a little purple tab
in the front of the pelvis to unlock the relevant transformation joints, but
it needs to go right back in plece when you're done too.
Also, the shoulders need a HARD shove to get them seated when going back to robot mode, and are similarly hard to fold down when going to vehicle
mode. You'd think they were load-bearing parts of Devastator (I'm pretty
sure they aren't).
One thing that might be a QC error on mine, or might be a problem with translating renders into reality, the hinge for the cab is supposed to go
into a socket in the backpack bit, but on mine it's a little too big. With
the help of a knife to pry bits I could force it in, but it tries to squeeze back out, so I might need to go at the slot with a Dremel. I did ask around, it seems to be a problem to varying degrees for others too, due to the
softness of the plastic in the hinge and the resulting ease with which it can warp out of alignment. One person reported being able to just squeeze it together with their fingers, while another had not just this problem but also issues getting the other arm to stay in. A picture of the problem spot is here: http://www.dvandom.com/images/ScavHinger.JPG .

Vehicle Mode: A classic G1-style power shovel with a little cab on the front left corner of the chassis. The cab covers up the shoulderpad gap on that side, but the right side has a big gap on top there. Suitable tech greebles molded on the chassis otherwise, even if the coloration tries to be animation-smooth.
The chassis is 3" (7.5cm) long, 3.25" (8cm) if you include the treads,
but the shovel can reach up to 4.25" (10.5cm) past the front of the treads.
It can also fold up all the way and only stick out behind the chassis a
little bit. Other than the pistol stuck on top, the black plastic is hidden
in this mode (the visible bits of the fist are fully painted, so that counts
as hidden). So just Constructicon green, purple, and silver. The main front and back drive wheels are painted silver, but the smaller drive wheels inside the treads are not painted. The six windows of the cab (front, back, two on each side) are painted dark purple, while the roof has a printed purple on silver Decepticon symbol rather than window paint.
Unlike some power shovel Transformers, this one does not have a swivel between the treads and the chassis. Well, not one that works in this mode,
the joint that becomes Devastator's shoulder is locked in place in this
mode. The only articulation is in the three hinges of the shovel arm, plus rotating the arm's attachment peg.
The only exposed connection point in this mode is that upper arm socket used for holding the pistol. There is a rectangular socket on the roof of
the cab, but that goes onto a tab on the backpack in robot mode, so it's probably not for carrying any combiner kibble. The shoulder joint stress sockets on top of the chassis might be used for combiner kibble duty,
although that'd require moving the pistol elsewhere. (As I later found out, Scavenger can't carry any combiner kibble in a useful way, only Scrapper
really has that option.)

Combiner Mode: Okay, here's my guess before looking at the combination instructions. Start with vehicle mode, pull the treads apart so that the center torso section can be folded out, then push the treads back together around the belt section to lock them down again. I think the little purple
tab from the center of the torso front doesn't do anything structural, it
just hides inside the forearm piece, there's a 5mm socket revealed on the
back of the torso piece that is otherwise not exposed in either mode and probably gets used for securing the forearm. The elbow hinge and a swivel above it are part of how the torso core connects to the upper arm. Without that little purple tab in place, the rest of the pelvis clearly slides over a shoulder peg on Hook, and a full shoulder joint between the treads and the chassis is now able to move.
Turned out I was correct, although I hadn't realized that the chest
wings would lock into rectangular slots on the left tread face.

Overall: A decent update, although some of the joints feel overpowered
in how hard they are to get moving, and there's that issue of the cab hinge.


DECEPTICON: CONCEPT ART KSI WIDOW
Assortment: G0857
Altmode: McLaren MP4-12C (licensed)
Transformation Difficulty: 17 steps
Previous Name Use: None
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: AoE
Scene: Concept Art

KSI WIDOW is a drone controlled by Galvatron.

Technically the car mode showed up in the background in Age of
Extinction, it just never transformed.

Packaging: Five ties hold the robot high up on the inner tray so that pretty much the whole thing is visible through the window. A little tissue bundle holds the two cestus blasters. The heels needed to be folded out the rest of the way, but I suspect that was less an intentional packaging issue
and more that they'd gotten bumped at some point in processing.
Since there's no scene to get a screenshot of, they used the AoE logo (a corroded metal 4 with the right half of a Decepticon symbol next to it). The grayed out backdrop is of the interior of a warehouse or factory floor, which is also the background on the right side of the box. The McLaren logo is displayed under the robot mode render
It passed the first very low bar test of movieverse toys, it came out of the package without falling apart. Of course, a kneecap popped off a few seconds later as I tried to make sure the feet were flat enough to let the figure stand up on its own, but that was technically after I was done
removing it from the packaging.

Robot Mode: With the way the fenders turn into big shoulderpads (and notably the headlights are on the shoulders rather than on the chest, so they avoided that cliche), this is a head swap away from being a movieverse Knockout. The head itself uses the "cables for hair" idea, two strands on either side of the head and then five attached to the back that cover the
neck socket but don't try to attach. The effect is "ponytail with some locks loose over the ears," rather than a more cowl-like design, slightly
reminiscent of Beast Machines Blackarachnia if she'd tied back some of her hair. There's definitely feminine lips molded into the Bayformer facial plates, but it's subtle. The doors hang down from the backs of the shoulderpads like a split short cape (they can't spread as wings), and
there's panels on the thighs, but most of the car shell appears to be folded
up as the boots. It's like a croissant up on those boots, all the folds and layers. Note, for aesthetics and to lock them in place, the hip-mounted door panels should be shoved all the way in, but that restricts the range of
motion of the knees. Pulling them all the way out lets the thigh panels and the boot panels slide past each other.
5" (12.5cm) tall in a Halloween-y mix of dark orange, black, dark
gunmetal and silver. The orange plastic is moderately metalswirled, and is used for the back of the head, the shoulderpads and door capes, the front
panel of the chest, the biceps, the thigh panels, and most of the mass of
each boot. A light gunmetal plastic is used for the front of the head, the
top of the chest, and the rear hair/spine piece. A slightly darker and glossier gunmetal plastic is used for the shoulders, shoulder struts, hips, toes, weapons, and the gasket bits on the posts that hold the thigh panels (those might be the lighter version, hard to be sure). Black plastic is
found on the tires (shoulderpads and boots), forearm/hand pieces, the front
of the lower chest and abdomen, the pelvis, and the thighs. There's clear smoky plastic on the windows of the door wings. There is no Decepticon
symbol, although I suppose you could put a tiny Micromaster-sized one on the blank license plate surface on her chest.
Most of the front of the face is painted silver, with little copper
cheek plates and gloss yellow eyes that glow fiercely under UV light.
There's slightly metallic dark orange paint detailing on the forearms and
thigh fronts. The abdomen has a silver arc and a copper belt buckle sort of shape. Much of the front of each shin is painted a dark gunmetal that I
think is supposed to match the black plastic.
The neck is a ball joint, but you have to make sure the hair goes under the shoulderpad if you want to turn the head more than a tiny bit, and it has
a fairly limited nodding range due to the ponytail being more of a wall
behind the head. Ball joint shoulders, upper bicep swivels, hinge elbows, no wrist joints. Ball joint hips, upper thigh swivels, hinge knees. The
kneecaps are hinged, but this doesn't really seem to be needed since the
knees don't bend backwards, likely just an aesthetic thing, tilt them
forwards in robot mode and flatten them for vehicle mode, and the renders
agree with that. The toes have maybe one stable position between "all the
way down" and "all the way up," but with no instep joints and really narrow toes, it's not really useful. The heels are snapped into place, and too
short to be meaningful in any other position anyway.
The partly-open hands can hold 5mm pegs, not that the weapons that come with this toy use that. There's a 3mm socket on the back of the pelvis as usual, and a 3mm peg on the spine that snaps into it to lock the waist in
place for vehicle mode. No other standard connectors.
Widow's weapons are a sort of cross between a cestus (partial gauntlet with a rigid cap over the fist and blaster, and they clip onto the forearms
(so no painting the forearms if you customize this figure, unless you ditch
the cesti). The apertures at the front are annoyingly slightly bigger than 3mm, so you can't use any 3mm post energy effects (like some RED figures had, and like I had Trent Troop design for me). Each is 1.25" (3cm) long and they're identical rather than being mirror images. They have 1.5mm by 5.5mm tabs on top near the back that go into slots on the inner faces of the door cape parts for storage.

Transformation: Given that the KSI drones all did the "cloud of nanotech morph" trick, the designs didn't need to be able to physically transform, but some thought had to be given to the idea anyway if they wanted to make toys
of it. Since the Widow never made it to the screen, they could more easily make whatever changes were necessary to make the robot mode work without
having to worry as much about losing screen accuracy for that mode. As a licensed vehicle, though, they had to make sure vehicle mode was spot on.
I really hoped that the weapons could be left on the forearms during transformation, but unfortunately they can't. And while it's pretty clear where they're supposed to go, at least on mine the tabs on the weapons don't
go into the intended slots, which leaves them blocking the hinge at the back for all the boot panels to cover the car. I might try some careful Dremeling or filing later to see if it helps...but the tabs do fit just fine in the
slots for robot mode storage under the minicape doors, so the fix needs to be made to the sockets inside the boots, which is a harder thing to do. On the other hand, since everything else is so tight around them, I suspect that if
I overdo the carving the weapons should stay in place in vehicle mode well enough. Actually checking the instructions confirms that I was right about where they were intended to store in vehicle mode, they just...don't. And since the chosen aesthetic eschews external connection points, there's no
other option for keeping the weapons attached to the toy in vehicle mode.
They definitely won't fit on their door storage points, if there were enough room for that they could also just stay on the arms. The mid-chassis is
TIGHT.
Leaving the weapons out, it's just a matter of massaging panels into
place (a knife helps), but I just could not get everything closed with the weapons in their intended spots. Even with them removed, though, not all of the panels wanted to line up exactly right, the main offender being the tab
on the rear fender piece not quite going into the slot on the thigh panel on one side. I also had to squeeze the roof and underbody together pretty hard until there was a loud pop to get the legs tucked up high enough that all
four wheels could touch the same plane. So, slight case of being a render dream even leaving out the cestus weapons.
At least in principle it's not too complicated, just tricky getting
things to move past each other and aligning all the panels correctly. The spine and head (the neck is actually part of the same part as the rear hair) fold back inside and have to be pushed HARD to get a peg into a socket so it rests flat enough for the arms to fit around it. The arms are hard to move once they're inside the shell, so if you didn't get them oriented just right the first time it's a major hassle to adjust the angles. And then there's
the boot panels. There is almost zero margin for error, and it's hard to go back and fix just one step later...an ultimately frustrating exercise in many ways. On my third try, with a LOT of knife prying to get panels out when they'd gone too far in, I managed to get it transformed with the cesti
loosely in place in the back. The sides have multiple things that each want
to go in place before the piece next to them, and this sets up some contradictions as a couple each want to be before each other. At least, as I suspected, not having the weapons securely plugged in is not a problem, as there's really no room for them to rattle around...although looking through
the shins I can see they turned sideways a bit and are now slightly
diagonal.
Going back to robot mode, the better you got everything together the harder it'll be to start things. Unless you want to use a knife, find a
place where the panels are the least together and pry the entire roof up (for me, that was over the rear left fender). Once that's done, it's easy enough
to unpeg the doors and get everything unfolding. Everything else other than the toes is pretty forgiving, but my nails are neither strong nor long enough to get the toes to fold down.

Vehicle Mode: Not the first altmode based on a McLaren high end sports car, but I think this is the first one to be licensed rather than a "just different enough to not get sued" design (like TFPrime's Smokescreen mold family). As often happens with licensed vehicles that have hood ornaments,
the hood panel dividing line goes around the logo rather than having a simple straight line between the halves. They managed to almost completely avoid orange paint, just needing it on the side window posts and upper trim, even that isn't too jarring since the swirly orange plastic looks different at various angles so some variation in shade is normal for the whole body. It
has the short-hood look of a rear engine car although Wikipedia tells me it's actually a mid-engine car, so the hood covers what is likely a laughably
small storage compartment. The proportions of the blank spots in front and back for license plates are not compatible with American plates, being more
in line with the narrower plates found in the EU countries and Britain. This is specifically a McLaren MP4-12C, the same model that Smokescreen approximated, but without a spoiler or other racing mods. Just a car that says, "I am rich, laws only lightly apply to me, and I pay someone else to
pick up my groceries and kids." Just the sort of thing the techbros in Age
of Extinction would want to turn into a killer robot, in other words. It was only manufactured from 2011 to 2014, making it timely for Beast Hunters but a period piece now. Interestingly, the convertible version was called the Spider, but this is the hardtop.
4.5" (11.5cm) long, making it about 1:39 scale, and the body shell is
all metalswirl dark orange, with smoked clear windows and a few bits of
silver here and there. The windows are all smoky clear plastic, and they're mostly inset in orange plastic borders. The door windows went with a painted frame on top, though. The wheels are almost-black plastic, and the rest of
the toy is that slightly metalswirled dark orange plastic.
Silver paint is used for the wheel hubs/brake discs, headlights, and
vents on the side edges and base of the rear window. The front and back grilles, the not-bumper bits in front and back, and the side scoops are
painted dark gunmetal, no separate paint for the molded taillights. It's
less obvious, but the windshield wiper is also painted dark gunmetal. The McLaren logo is printed in silver on the back, and the little McLaren swoosh hood ornament is painted red. There is no Decepticon symbol here either, although if placed anywhere on the centerline it'd need to be split since the seam runs down the entire length of the car on top.
No articulation, and as noted there's no external connection points at all. At best it has 2mm of ground clearance if you get everything popped
into place, but it rolls decently on snap-in wheels if you do manage that.

Overall: A serious but (unlike Starscream) not insurmountable case of WIRNIR, but I do have to wonder if getting even the render to transform required allowing some clipping. The instructions assume that folding the
roof down would just be a simple step, despite there being parts that simply cannot slide past each other. Definitely not something I'm going to buy in redeco form should they release it as either a "leader" color variant or with
a headswap as someone else.


AUTOBOT (sort of): ELITA-1
Assortment: G1851 (not even close to the others)
Altmode: Cybertronian motorcycle
Transformation Difficulty: 25 steps
Previous Name Use: ES, TFOne, CW (Most toys were "Elita-One")
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: TF One
Scene: No clear scene suggested

ELITA-1 is a team leader who gets the job done, no matter the cost.

Calling the Cyberworld version "previous" is kinda a technicality, since this particular toy got into my hands a week after the Cyberworld one.
This is the only fully articulated Transforming version of TF One's Elita-1, and it didn't come out until over a year after the movie was in theaters (or even on BluRay). The short stop-motion pieces Hasbro has put up on their YouTube channel have had to make do with the battler figure, which
has floppy arms and no other articulation.
This Elita-1 continues the general trend post-G1 that she and Optimus Prime/Orion Pax were not dating, in an attempt to make her more than just an accessory for him. This one might go the farthest in terms of her reaction
to the suggestion of dating Orion Pax being disgust.

Packaging: Four ties hold the robot to the inner tray, two more hold
the semi-generic Cybertronian rifle to the right panel, and the usual tissue bundle taped to the lower right has her jetpack.
The vehicle art has her driving through the topside cyber-vegetation and water, which is repeated in grayscale on the back.
While nothing actually fell off while taking the toy out of the box, one of the heel spurs had come out of its sockets and was just waiting to fall
out entirely.

Robot Mode: Okay, she's extremely leggy, a common design motif used to make a robot look feminine without resorting to spherical breasts and
lipstick. However, this is TFOne, EVERYONE is extremely leggy, so in that respect she doesn't stand out a whole lot...her main feminine visual marker
is that she's also slender in general, rather than having a barrel chest on
top of skinny legs like Optimus or Megatron. Like a lot of motorcycle or motorcycle-ish altmode types, she has half wheels inside her ankle joints, although they did do something moderately original for the other wheels, folding them in half and sticking them inside the chest. The result is a pretty weak connection between chestplate and torso, though. She comes with the standard-design jetpack and rifle from the movie, and while the jetpack isn't technically integral to either mode, it's used to cover up stuff in
both modes. She has the same sort of rounded-top shoulders as Orion Pax and several other characters in the movie, it being another recurring visual
motif like the long legs. They did a generall good job of capturing her post-cog-acquisition robot mode, other than big fenders on the forearms and
the backpack kibble that the jetpack tries to hide. As a concession to physics, she has long heel spurs instead of the mid-height "biker boot" heels her animated design has...well, in addition to them. The heels as animated
are molded, but then magenta spurs stick out about a centimeter further back
to keep the backpack from pulling her over backwards (when the heel spurs
don't just pop out, that is). Looking at some animation designs, the center
of the chest should be gunmetal rather than silver, but it is not the
location of the headlight from vehicle mode, the headlight would be just
above the collar but must fold away in the animation deaign. The center of
the chest would make a decent place for a tiny Autobot symbol if you want to make the post-movie version, and there's a similar space ahead of the
headlight in vehicle mode that's nice and flat for an Autobot symbol.
Almost 5.5" (about 13.5cm) tall in a mix of "CG-shiny" magenta, light silvery gray and dark gunmetal. The magenta plastic (the color of innermost Energon, if you will) is not quite metallic, but has more of a pearly sheen, and it's used for the head, outer upper arms, forearms/fists, chestplate,
front and back plates of the pelvis, kneespikes, shins, calves, and heel
spurs, plus some of the folded up vehicle panels on the back. Light silvery gray plastic is used for the torso sides, waist, pelvis core (including hip struts), thighs, wheel-holding struts along the backs of the boots, feet, rifle, jetpack, and a few of the back kibble pieces. Dark gunmetal plastic
is used for the wheels, the inner parts of the upper arms (including the sockets for the shoulder joints), hip joints, knee joints, ankle joints, and
a visible bit at the top of the back kibble pile.
Aside from the glossy bright blue eyes, all the paint is either silver
or dark gunmetal. Silver for the face, a few details on the front/top of the helmet, a pattern on the chest that leaves the unpainted magenta parts look like bra cups that aren't connected in the middle, and the belly button.
Dark gunmetal on the chestplate is on the collar area and the lower abdomen. It's also used in details on the sides of her helmet, the sockets and greeble bits along the inner third of the outer face of each upper arm, on the elbows and the inner halves of the forearms (to copy the pattern in the upper arms attained through different plastics), the fingers and thumbs (leaving enough magenta to look like fingerless gloves), the lower shins, and the toes.
There's some more paint on the folded up backpack bits, but that's really vehicle mode stuff. There is no paint on the wheels.
Before going into the articulation in general, I need to point out that the thighs are weird. They look like they have the usual swivel mostly
hidden by the thigh, but they also have a rounded cheese wheel sort of shape
in addition to the usual disc, and this is made to keep the swivel from
turning more than a few degrees either way. It's less a joint used for
posing the figure, and more a way to get a little wiggle room for transformation if needed.
The neck is a ball and socket joint with the socket in the collar, it's pretty restricted aside from rotation, but the collar itself has a transformation hinge that also lets the head tilt forward significantly for looking down. Be careful moving the head, the chestplate is only very weakly tabbed onto the torso. Smooth swivel waist, ball and socket shoulders and elbows (the upper arm shape is not friendly to bicep swivels), no wrists.
Ball and socket hips, the above mentioned kinda-swivels for the thighs. The knees are double hinges, although aesthetically you mainly want to just use
the upper hinge in robot mode, the lower one is more of a transformation
joint. The ankles are ball joints with the sockets in the feet and enough
side to side wiggle room to fill the role of the instep hinge that this to doesn't have.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, and that's it for standard connectors. The centers of the outer faces of the shoulders have 4mm sockets meant to be used in vehicle mode to store the rifle via its side peg. There's a pair of 2mm
by 5mm slots on the back which are there for the jetpack. There is no 3mm socket on the pelvis or the back, although there is one on the left side of each foot (the feet connect via 3mm peg and socket, and I guess it was
simpler for assembly to make the feet identical), so you could potentially
use one of those for a flight base connection point.
The rifle is a variation on the standard rifle design that's shown up
with some TFOne toys (notably the Blokees), which looks like it was designed
to be kind of aerodynamic in case it had to be attached on the outside of a flyer's altmode. All silvery gray plastic, a little over 3" (about 8cm) long with dark gunmetal paint on the barrel and tech greebles around it inside the cowling. The grip is actually a separate piece on a hinge (held in with a screw rather than a pin, oddly), although it doesn't fold completely flat against the stock. It makes me wonder if it's meant to be standardized so
that figures whose fist sockets aren't perpendicular to their forearms can
also hold it. There's a 4mm by 2.2mm tab on the side just ahead of the grip
on the left side, rather than a round peg, which is another argument for
"this can be given to someone else and just go into any sufficiently
forgiving 2mm wide slot for storage". The aperture is "rifled" and narrower than 3mm even without the rifling. If you leave off the jetpack, you can
cram the 2mm tab on the side into one of the jetpack connection sockets on
the back, but you have to force it a bit, thanks to that 0.2mm difference. Similarly, the rifle can be made to store on the top of vehicle mode.
As for the backpack, I KNOW that's designed to be handed off to others,
or like they considered including it with everyone but ended up only giving
one to Elita because the budget couldn't handle it on anyone else. All light gray plastic with some dark gunmetal on the housing of the downward-pointed thrusters, it's based on the ones used by no-altmode characters and non-
flyers in general in the movie. It's about 1.5" (4cm) wide, 1.25" (3cm)
tall, and not terribly thick. There's five rectangular tabs on the side
facing the wearer, plus a 5mm socket along the centerline near the top in
back. Just below the socket are two 2mm by 5mm tabs that go into the slots
on Elita-1's back or Studio Series B-127/Bumblebee's back. However, they're only 2mm long, and don't stay in very well on either of them, partly because they're more trapezoidal in height (the tab is slightly less than 5mm long at the tip), but in Elita's case mostly because a headlight detail on the
backpack blocks the tabs from going in more than the bare minimum. The outer bottom corners have properly rectangular 2mm by 5mm by 2mm deep tabs, these
go into slots on the back of Studio Series Orion Pax/Optimus Prime. At the middle of the bottom edge is a tab that's 2mm thick, 6mm wide, and 3mm long that goes into the slot on Studio Series D-17/Megatron's back, but only if
you remove the cannon barrel piece from it first. This is easily the most solid of the connections, despite being only one tab. There is no place on
the jetpack to connect the rifle, although given how poorly it stays on some figures (like the one it came with), perhaps adding more weight to the
jetpack by attaching the rifle would be a bad idea. There is a screw hole on the back that is 5mm wide at the top, but it narrows towards the screw head,
so it can't actually hold anything even if you remove the screw to deepen the available space. (Okay, to be fair, I did eventually figure out how to get
it to stay on a little better, you have to lift up the back panel so you can more easily squeeze hard without risking damage to the chestplate.)
Sadly, I rather doubt we'll get an accessory pack with extra rifles and jetpacks for the others. If Target did a four-pack of all of the TFOne
Deluxe protagonists, that sort of thing might include rifles and jetpacks for everyone, but to date their multi-packs have been pretty much anything except Studio Series. OTOH, they did start doing MTMTE Collection figures that are from Studio Series, so maybe there's hope? Eh, still a long shot unless TF
Two gets announced.

Transformation: So, when I finished transforming this the first time, or at least got as far as I could get, I thought that surely I had missed something. Elita's head and chestplate couldn't possibly just be hanging
down in front of the rear wheels. But no, that's the official place for
them. (Note, the hinge at the waist is easy to pop out, especially if you're trying to force the head further up to keep it from scraping on the ground in vehicle mode.) The instructions and box-back render also have the rifle attached to the left side pointing backwards, but it looks better on the
right side pointing forwards. At least there's no significant WIRNIR, it's a little difficult to get the front end folded up tightly enough to let the
tabs and slots on the piece with the headlight connect to the robot knees,
but that's not a huge problem. A little practice does help, knowing what's coming lets you get stuff positioned correctly in advance, as order does tend to matter. Many of the tabs are merely guides and do not secure anything.
Once it's solidly on its peg for vehicle mode, it's very difficult to
get the jetpack off. The entire peg piece is way more likely to pop off its hinge instead, and the tabs on either side mean you can't twist to loosen
it. Too bad they couldn't have moved some of that tenacity to the robot mode connection! This is really the only difficult part of going back to robot mode, though.

Vehicle Mode: One of the increasingly common trike styles (as seen in
the massively reused femmebot mold from Power of the Primes and Siege), as
the rear wheels do not snap together to make a single wheel but instead give two narrow wheels with space between them. They're also hidden within the frame, so it might be that this is supposed to be a two-wheeled vehicle and they're just cheating. The wide fenders formed by the shins and forearms
make this a non-rideable vehicle, more of a three-wheeler coupe or something, complete with a motorcycle-style fender on the front wheel and a sort-of- headlight on the panel behind the fender. Without the jetpack, the back end
is a bit open and unfinished-looking.
If you fold the kneespikes down from inside the front fenders, they look kind of like scorpion pincers. B-127's gonna get the CLAMPS.
With the jetpack on back, it's 4.5" (11.5cm) long and 2.25" (5.5cm)
wide. Same colors as robot mode, but with less of the dark funmetal visible, and the faux headlight thing (the part that keeps the jetpack from connecting well in robot mode) being a slightly lighter and warmer blue than the robot mode eyes. The front fender, front wheel fork, and the bit in back to which the jetpack attaches are light silvery gray (the actual peg the jetpack connects to is dark gunmetal plastic). The magenta plastic panel just aft of the fender has the molded headlight-ish thing as well as silver paint that evokes the chest of robot mode (the chest does not have the headlight part molded in the center of the collarbone, though), while the also magenta middle/top panel is painted silver around the edges, leaving what looks like
an ungrounded power outlet.
As far as connections go, there's the peg in back for attaching the backpack, the 4mm sockets on the rear fenders, and a couple of pairs of 6mm
by 2mm slots on the top and front pink panels. The fists can be accessed
from underneath, and the 3mm socket on the outer face of the merged feet
still works for things like flight stands.
There is functionally no ground clearance. With everything properly tabbed and slotted, the back of the head is in the same plane as the bottoms
of the wheels...all the wheels touch the ground, but the head scrapes.
That's a WIRNIR, they should've expected alignments to be not quite perfect
and had the back of the head be a little shallower. Trying to do that myself would remove molded detail, though. If you're really careful, it's possible
to pull the front wheel down a little bit without disconnecting anything,
which gives a millimeter or so of ground clearance. Just don't expect it to roll smoothly, as the front wheel tends to have a lot of axle friction and
the rear wheels don't like to stay aligned and pointed the same direction.

Overall: This is the best TFOne Elita-1 toy I own, but it's not exactly
a competition, since the others are the barely-transforms battling bot toy,
and a non-transforming model kit type (not reviewed) that despite claiming to not need glue does need some glue to avoid falling apart. They didn't even
put her in the first wave of TFOne Blokees. That said, she's okay, if best left in robot mode due to deficiencies in the vehicle mode.


Dave Van Domelen, way too much of this wave needs a knife for some part
of transformation.

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