From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Leader Class wave 21

Astrotrain (shuttle, train)

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

Wavemate is a package refresh of Dinobot Snarl (from wave 12).

This review took me a while to finish, partly because I was not particularly inspired by the design, but mostly because I came down with "everything is congested" for a couple weeks and didn't really feel like
doing anything too thinky when I got home after work.
I suspect a toy deco version will come out eventually, either as a Pulse exclusive or even as a regular wave (given how many redecos seem to be
showing up in the 2027 reveals at ComiCon), it'd probably be more visually interesting.


CAPSULE

$60 at HasbroPulse.

Astrotrain: Robot mode is in the "almost but not quite" range on a lot
of measures, train mode is pretty good and clearly the focus of the toy, shuttle mode...exists. Far closer to the G1 animation model than previous Astrotrains (not that Classics and Titans Return really even tried), but you gotta squint a bit or take off your glasses if you have 'em. Mildly recommended. Not gonna bother with any redecos, but if you don't have this version yet you might want to wait to see if there's a better one later.


RANT

Okay, I still hadn't put away Siege/Earthrise Astrotrain (I will after I finish this review and slot the new one into my display), so I can make some direct comparisons here and there. The Siege/Earthrise (it was an early
"last wave you're never gonna see gets re-released in the first wave of the next year" example, so Siegerise) version is almost a decade old, and cheated
a bit by having a removable chunk that formed the coal car or a launchpad, I guess. Despite all the online criticism of this new mold, it doesn't resort
to partforming. Well, not intentionally...let's see if parts fall off during transformation accidentally, eh?

Packaging: Standard 2025-6 Studio Series Leader box.


DECEPTICON: ASTROTRAIN
Assortment: G2190/G0374
Altmodes: Space Shuttle, Steam Engine Train
Transformation Difficulty: 29 steps (robot to train), 16 steps (train to
shuttle).
Previous Name Use: G1, Classics, Gen:TR, Earthrise
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: TFtM
Scene: Escaping Autobot City

The DECEPTICONS escape Autobot City aboard ASTROTRAIN.

Packaging: The robot mode is held to the inner tray by four plastic
ties, plus a rubber band around the upper body to keep the head from flipping back. (Only the tie around the thighs needs to be cut, the rest can be
pulled out of position.) Another rubber band runs around the forearms and behind the back to keep the arms from flopping around. Two ties hold the
smoke plume accessory along the left edge, they can just be stretched if you don't want to cut them and have bits of plastic string get everywhere. The obligatory plastic bag taped in the lower right has the three (flexible but
not rubbery like Siege Fire Blasts) thruster fire blasts, the purple rifle
from the G1 toy, and the smaller gray pistol he used in the cartoon.
The screenshot on the back upper left is Astrotrain in train mode
driving away and preparing to shift to shuttle mode, as a hapless Decepticon
(I think maybe an Insecticon based on the colors, but the details are
lacking) fails to catch up in time. Oddly the scenery on the right side
seems to be the mountain road that Hot Rod and Daniel drove on, and maybe Blitzwing was on, but Astrotrain was not shown on in the movie.
The renders on the box back show the big new smoke plume accessory on train mode, and there's an inset in the lower left showing a trio of magenta thruster fire blasts attached to shuttle mode's three main engines (there's a little of one visible on the main shuttle render). The renders also give the robot gray ankle struts, but the toy has them as purple.
The "out of the box" instructions show the extra steps needed to give
the figure a toy-style robot mode with a split shuttle tail on the chest.
The lack of paint on this bonus feature does call out for customization (or ToyHax, who already has their label set out). Unfortunately, if you do this, there's a huge gap in the abdomen.

Robot Mode: Straight out of the box this gives a poor first impression
in terms of stability, because what the instructions don't say about "out of the box" steps is that there's something like a dozen things that probably
came untabbed during shipping and need to be locked back down. After I transformed it to the other modes and back the first time, robot mode was a
lot more solid than when I first pulled it off the tray.
Anyway, this is trying to get close to the animation model, since it's Studio Series, which means kinda boring colors, almost entirely medium gray
and violet-purple with just a little bit of yellow on the helmet and white on the face. It's notably missing the splash of red on the abdomen of the animation model, making it even duller than it needs to be. The arms are a
bit spindly and the proportions are...just slightly off in a lot of ways. No one thing really stands out on its own, but the vibe is drifting into the uncanny valley. Mind you, SiegeRise Astrotrain was bloated and Pat Lee-ish,
I guess they sort of average out to being about right? Aside from the proportions, there's the train wheel bits not very securely tabbed to the
sides of the boots and almost hiding on the backs of the wings. The heels
are really long and end in wheels, so at least there's no danger of the backpack-heavy figure falling over.
6.75" (17cm) tall in mostly medium gray and a sort of violet-purple matching the animation colors pretty well. All the plastic is either medium gray or violet-purple, although some parts are painted the other color with pretty decent matching. Medium gray plastic is used for the arms, torso
front, pelvis front, hips, thighs, and most of the mass of the boots, plus
some train drive shafts on the wheel pieces and both guns. The purple
plastic is the head, torso back, wings, backpack, train wheel chunks on the wings and boots, ankle struts, and heel wheels. The three thrusters on the back are completely painted silver, but they appear to be medium gray
plastic.
The face is painted gloss white with red eyes, the helmet forehead is golden yellow. There's medium gray paint on the folded down wing flaps, with no-outline violet Decepticon symbols on the wing fronts. There's some other bits of golden yellow and red paint on the boots and golden yellow on the backpack, but those are for vehicle modes.
The neck is a restricted ball joint with the socket in the head, while
the waist is a smooth swivel blocked by the backpack from moving much. The wings are hinged for transformation and to let them get a little out of the way. Hinge and swivel universal shoulders, bicep swivels, double hinge
elbows, swivel wrists (although they look dislocated if you turn them too
far), and mitten hinge fingers. The hips are hinge and swivel universal joints, and while the pelvis armor skirt flaps are hinged to get out of the way, in practice they get caught on the thigh swivel seam if you just try lifting a leg, so you need to lift them up first. Upper thigh swivels, ratcheting knees (looks to be 15 degrees per click, seven-click range), stay-flat hinges on the ankles. The ankles can also move forwards and backwards a bit on the transformation struts, but this isn't very stable.
(The struts seem to assume they tab in place, but the tabs don't really hold them at all, so it's just friction.)
The hands can hold 5mm pegs with or without the fingers closed, and the three thrusters on the back have 5mm sockets. Thruster-like details under
the toes do not actually hold 5mm pegs, but their central pegs can sort of
hold Fire Blasts as described below in shuttle mode. There's three more 5mm sockets on the backpack, one on the underside and one on either side (the
side ones are for weapon storage). The toy otherwise makes use of a lot of nonstandard tabs and slots, not all of which hold well.
As noted earlier, the figure comes with a small pistol based on the animation model and a larger rifle based on what came with the original toy. The pistol is a single piece of slightly hollow medium gray plastic 1.75" (4.5cm) long with a 5mm grip near the back and a 3mm stud barrel tip. The
big rifle is also medium gray plastic, but painted violet-purple everywhere except the 5mm grip peg near the back end. It's 2.75" (7cm) long and has a
5mm socket barrel opening. The paint layer is thin enough to not cause major problems with barrel-plug 5mm Fire Blasts.
The three identical Fire Blasts are made of milky white translucent soft plastic, although not quite as rubbery as "true" Fire Blasts, with hollow undersides for the blast spheres from which pointy bits emerge. They're 1.5" (4cm) long with all but the peg end painted hot magenta. While the 5mm pegs technically have 3mm sockets down the middle, I do not recommend leaving them on the small pistol, as this can permanently warp the pegs to be more than
5mm wide and therefore difficult to get into the shuttle thrusters.
The last accessory is the smoke effect, which is mainly meant for the train mode, but I suppose it can go on the backpack to simulate battle
damage. It's made of the same milky translucent white plastic as the Fire Blasts, with dark gray paint near the root where it goes into the
smokestack. The whole thing is 6.5" (17cm) long. It also has a second 5mm
peg near the back end, which goes on the roof in train mode.

Transformations: The basic ideas of each mode are reasonably easy to figure out, but the finishing details tend to be frustrating. I went from robot to shuttle first since it seemed more straightforwards, and I was
wrong, at least at the end. The first time was a floppy mess because so many things just didn't line up correctly.
The train requires SO MANY tabs and slots to line up just right...good luck with that. You'd think that once all the tabs are in all the slots, everything would line up and they'd stay there, but there's just enough parts without tabs that can be slightly misaligned and prevent successful transformation. The wings are only snapped onto a strut, and pop off pretty easily when transforming, including when trying to force all the tabs to
align when the wings are folded around the back half.
Going from train to shuttle (as recommended in the instructions) would
be pretty quick and simple except I ended up having to undo a bunch of the
back end in order to get the tail out. Otherwise, it's mostly unfolding the wing section and swinging it around to the other end so that the thrusters cover the train front, while the train wheels kinda sorta hide on the undersides of the wings and the sides of the fuselage. Since the hard work
of getting all the tabs and slots lined up was already accomplished in train mode, my second time going to shuttle mode worked a lot better.

Train Mode: Okay, it's a very purple train. Unlike Siege Astrotrain
where the wheels didn't all have the same width and the front end was kinda tiny, this is well-proportioned and has relatively few gaps or kibble, especially if you can get all the tabs to stay in place. There's a few incongruous wheels on the outside, including a big one on the roof that is covered by the smoke effect piec, and of course, there's the shuttle engines
on the back but that's something the animation model has too. There's four wheels on each side, all connected by a drive strut (whatever train people
call that thing) on each side.
6.5" (16.5cm) long and very purple, although some of the boundaries make it clearer that there's two slightly different shades of light purple
plastic. The not-cowcatcher is the gray plastic from the robot chest, the drive struts are gray plastic, and a few hinges are visible on either side in front. That's all the visible gray in this mode (the thrusters being fully painted). Very little paint in this mode, there's golden yellow paint in the windows on the sides in back (but not on the molded windows in back), light purple paint on the not-cowcatcher fronts, and violet no-border Decepticon symbols printed on the sides of the very front. No other paint other than
the silver on the shuttle thrusters and dark gray on the smoke effect.
In principle the drive struts make sure all the wheels on a side roll together, in practice they can get jammed pretty easily unless the wheels are all in good contact with the surface. The smokestack opening is a 5mm
socket, there's a 5mm socket in the middle on top (it's covered by the smoke effect), one on the roof, and one on either side of the back of the cab, plus the three shuttle thrusters. The front and back sockets on top are used by
the smoke effect, and the guns store on the sides of the cab in back.

Shuttle Mode: Yeah, this is the weakest link in the toy. I will say
that the second time through, starting from train instead of robot, I got a much more solid vehicle...the first time was pretty floppy. But the train stuff is barely hidden in back, under the wings, and on the sides. The tail, while it did an okay job of opening up on the robot chest, is too stubby, and there's too much train stuff behind it. At least it's a little more colorful than train mode, with a lot of the medium gray as well as some extra paint
apps (the train windows are still visible in back, though).
6.75" (17cm) long with a wingspan of 5.25" (13.5cm) making it roughly a scale of HAHAHAHAHAHA Devastator can fit inside, Astrotrain doesn't DO
scale. The purple plastic is mostly in the wings, the back, and some obvious train-wheel-pieces-backwards panels on the sides, plus all the wheels (two on fold-down struts in front, one under each wing, one under the center rear).
All else is gray plastic. The nose section is painted mostly purple, and the flaps at the backs of the wings are painted gray. There's a golden yellow rectangle on either side just ahead of the purple panels, with thinner red rectangles in the lower halves of the yellow rectangles. The cockpit windows are light blue and a no-outline violet Decepticon symbol is printed on the nose. There's additional no-outline violet symbols on each wing. The violet printed details on the forearms are visible on the top behind the proper
shell pieces. And, of course, the train windows and silver painted thrusters are visible.
It rolls okay on the five wheels. If you want to stow the front wheels you need to partially detransform the underside, though. There's two 5mm sockets on the centerline of the underside (train roof middle and rear), the thrusters remain accessible as 5mm sockets for thrust fire blasts, and the recessed 3mm posts from under the toes now look like vertical landing
thrusters and can hold long-post Fire Blasts of sufficient flexibility (the included three aren't flexible enough, and technically a bit smaller than 3mm as I found out to my annoyance). There's also the side of the train cab 5mm sockets which are intended for gun storage in this mode as they are in train mode.
While the smoke effect piece is not officially used in this mode, it can certainly represent Astrotrain struggling along after taking damage.

Overall: Better than some of the early pictures made it look, but that
was a VERY low bar (some of the early pics were also mistransformed in the chest). Probably the best train mode since the original, if not the best overall, but the shuttle is kinda iffy and the robot mode has a lot of minor problems that add up to a lack of enthusiasm from me.


Dave Van Domelen, needs to pick something more inspiring from the stack for the next review to shake this funk.
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