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Dave's Transformers Age of the Primes Rant: Commander wave 2

Onslaught (cannon truck, Bruticus core)
Bruticus (Super Warrior)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/AoP/Commander2

Well, I still don't have Swindle, so I'll have to update and repost this review once I have it. Hasbro Pulse still claims November, but I've seen
some people have it in-hand (presumably from other sources), so it could ship any day now...Pulse estimates often have a heavy leavening of CYA.


CAPSULE

$99.99 at HasbroPulse...yeah, I stuck the Monstructor set under
Commander, but it's actually cheaper than Commander Class. Nexus Prime demonstrated that the non-skeleton part of modern combiners is functionally a Voyager, which means the trailer is almost sixty bucks on its own.

Onslaught: Most of the problems with this are aesthetic and come from being too good at matching the animation model, which is sort of like complaining that the hot curry is hot, but there you have it. If you want to deal with stickers, ToyHax can probably give you a more toy-style
appearance. Aesthetics aside, the vehicle, robot, and battle station modes
are decent even if you leave out that it's also the Bruticus frame. I think
it does a better job of standing on its own than Silverbolt (really forced combined vehicle) and Motormaster (lots of leftover bits in combiner mode).
A few points off for lacking a personal weapon for robot mode, but I think Swindle stole it. Recommended.

Completed Bruticus: Witholding judgment until I have Swindle in hand.
So far so good, though.


RANTS

Packaging: Same size and style of box as Silverbolt. The art on the
front has robot mode Onslaught dominant on the left, with vehicle modes of
the other four in the background behind Onslaught's vehicle mode. As with other Combaticons, the left side of the box has a slice of Bruticus art. The right side has the slice of the Primes gallery centered on Nexus Prime. The cartouche on the front uses a Huffer-style tractor cab as the vehicle mode.
The back of the box shows the skeletal Bruticus on the left half, with blue-and-white-line Blastoff and Brawl shown in insets attached. The upper right has the individual robot and truck front modes, the lower left has the full vehicle mode, and the lower right shows the robot using the trailer in base mode, with a blue-line Brawl sitting atop it.
In the inner corrugated cardboard tray, the trailer is strapped down on the right side with a folded up roof around the turret part to protect it. Three double ties and a taped-shut roof hold the trailer down. In the
middle, three double ties hold the cab down (although one of them had burst loose on its own on mine). The turret shell is held down on the left side
with two single ties, while a taped down baggie above it (as in, towards the top of the page, not vertically over) holds the barrels of the turret.
Oddly, the instructions only show how to transform Blast Off and Brawl into component mode. I mean, Vortex is obvious enough, but I guess either Swindle is also really obvious, or because he's released the same year as Onslaught they were allowed to put the combiner mode instructions on his
sheet?


DECEPTICON: ONSLAUGHT
COMBATICON: 4 of 5
Altmode: Cannon Truck
Combiner Component: Torso/Skeleton
Transformation Difficulty: 44 steps (vehicle to robot and battle station),
46 steps (robot/battle station to combiner skeleton).
Previous Name Use: G1, G2, Classics, CW, RotF, Fall of Cybertron
Previous Mold Use: None
Origin Universe: G1

When assembling it out of the box, you need to fold up the front part of the turret cap so that when you snap it onto its hinge, you can cover up the fake waist wheels before folding the barrel section back down. This is in
the instrutions, four of the six assembly steps for "packaging mode to full vehicle mode" at the start. Took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out without looking at the instructions, though.

Vehicle Mode: Okay, so Onslaught in G1 was a sort of military flatbed hauler with a cannon mounted on it near the front of the flatbed. The cab
was more like a semitractor, and it wasn't articulated. This sticks to the basic concept, but now the towing "cab" is more of a Hummvee stretched out
with semitractor-like double axle wheels in back. It has a bunch of gaps and other elements that don't look like a proper vehicle (I suppose someone has already designed gap-fillers that go on the sids the cover the worst of
this), but it does separate from the trailer. The trailer has a much bulkier gun on it with an actual turret shape, although it doesn't elevate like the
G1 cannons (well, if you unfold the front you can make the top shell elevate, but it's not quite the same). The trailer part is relatively thicker and the usable deck is proportionally shorter, with an extra dose of "looks wrong
from the sides" because you can pretty much see the combiner arms under the deck. The trailer has four wheels in back, but instead of fold-out legs for when it's not attached, there's a single hidden roller under the front
center. The deck of the trailer has diamondplate patterning, although it doesn't actually help anything grip. :)
The whole thing is 15.25" (38.5cm) long in mostly dark blue with some olive green, light gray, and silver, plus black wheels. The cab on its own
is 6.25" (16cm) long, while the trailer is 11.5" (29cm) long with the cannons pointed forwards, or 10.5" (26.5cm) with the turret pointed backwards. The
top shell of the turret is olive green, a noticeably darker shade than
Brawl's, and while paint covers everything except the rear socket the barrel pieces that peg onto the turret are also olive green. On the sides of the
cab you can see some olive green bits through the gaps, and the combiner arms visible on the sides of the trailer are also mostly olive green. When you unhook the trailer, there's olive green taillight pieces on the cab part.
The very front of the trailer (combiner hips and pelvis) and most of the innards of the turret are light gray plastic, as are the visible combiner
fists on either side of the back end of the trailer. All ten wheels are
black plastic (the hidden roller is light gray), the shoulder joints visible
on the cab sides and the inner hip joints and elbow joints on the sides of
the trailer are black plastic. The combiner chestplate wings are visible on the sides of the turret, and they're mostly dark neutral gray with light gray edges (separate plastic, not paint). Everything else is very dark blue plastic.
The main paint in this mode is silver, which is on the two cannon
barrels, the wheel hubs, the headlights, front grille, bumper, and some bits
of combiner pelvis skirt visible under the turret. The front and side
windows on the cab are matte black, and there's some dark blue paint on the thigh sides on the trailer. Most of the chestplate wing bits on the turret sides are painted a dark blue-gray, leaving only a bit of the dark neutral
gray plastic visible. Oddly, there is no Decepticon symbol visible in this mode. Okay, maybe not so odd, since neither Brawl nor Vortex have symbols in vehicle mode either. Blast Off makes up for them all by having that huge one on the top of the cockpit.
It rolls decently on basically eleven wheels total, the trailer can bend 25-30 degrees either direction, and the turret can spin a full 360 degrees.
As an undocumented feature, the panels that become the combiner heels can
fold up near the back of the deck.
The vehicle is absolutely covered in nonstandard tabs and slots. As far as standard connectors go, the cab has nothing unless you count the robot
fists accessible under the front end. The turret has a 5mm socket on top,
5mm pegs on either side in back, and the barrel extensions attach to 5mm pegs on the barrel stumps. The full barrels have 5mm socket muzzle apertures, so they can use most standard 5mm-peg Fire Blasts. There's 5mm pegs on either side of the deck near the back end (like, pointing out to the sides, not pointing up, these are used for battle station mode). On the underside of
the trailer just ahead of the rear wheels are some 5mm sockets that are part
of the combiner elbows (and go into those 5mm pegs on the sides for battle station mode). None of the various tabs and slots on the top of the deck are useful for stabilizing a vehicle carried as cargo.
Any one of the component vehicles can ride on the trailer as somewhat unstable cargo, although you have to have Vortex's guns on his tail rather
than the nose. They all kind of slide around, even with the grooves in the trailer more or less lining up with landing gear on Vortex and Blast Off. However, if you lift the combiner heel spur panels up about 45 degrees, Brawl is nicely held in place (and I presume Swindle would be as well). Note that nothing in the instructions or on the box documents this feature, although
the box showing Brawl on the battle station mode is enough of a hint.

Transformations: In G1 the entire vehicle turned into the regular robot, but in keeping with Motormaster's design, the cab part becomes the Onslaught robot while the trailer becomes either a battle station or the combiner skeleton. And yes, G1 Onslaught had a sort of battle station mode, it just left the truck cab stuck to it because it was all one piece.
The cab going to robot mode is fairly straightforwards, although you
have to get the order of steps correct to turn the roof of the vehicle into
the robot's backpack...do the wrong step first and you have to back up when
it comes time to fold out the backpack cannons. Yeah, the main turret is on the trailer, but there's a secondary smaller set of cannon barrels hidden inside the cab that poke up behind Onslaught's head. (They do NOT hide again for combiner mode, Bruticus just gets two small and two large barrels behind his head.) The rear wheel panels fold out to let the legs unbend, and you
need to bend the tail light pieces out of the way before folding down the
feet.
The battle station is a bit of a partformer, you pull the arms out from under the trailer and reattach them on the sides, then fold up the front part into a turret, with the trailer hitch becoming a sort of firing grip...not
that the robot can even touch it with his hands, but the connectors are thin tabs that won't go into 5mm socket fists anyway.

Robot Mode: So, this is definitely the simplified for animation look for Onslaught, it would take a pretty big sticker sheet to get it to look like
the G1 toy. Like, almost entirely dark blue with olive and silver Mickey Mousee shorts, although the toy adds more black that the animation model
didn't have...not that it's blatant under normal lighting. Anyway, if I thought this would spend any significant time not in Bruticus mode, I'd be tempted to add at least a little color to break up all that dark blue. The front fenders and wheels end up on the inner faces of the forearms, as in the G1 model, which makes it even more difficult for the already stubby arms to cross in front of the torso. So, as indicated earlier, forget about trying
to actually hold the battle station grips.
Just shy of 7" (17.5cm) tall at the head, 7.75" (19.5cm) tall at the
tops of the cannon barrels behind the head. Mostly dark blue and black with some olive green and silver. Interestingly, there's two distinct shades of olive green, with the pelvis front and hip skirt flaps being slightly darker than the other olive green plastic used on the pelvis rear, the guns panel behind the head, and the taillights above the heels. The darker shade is
also barely visible on hinges inside the backpack. Black plastic is used for the collar area, shoulder roots, elbows, fists, thighs, knees, and the
wheels. There's also two different shades of dark blue, and while UV makes
it really obvious, you can tell with regular bright light. The slightly less dark shade is used for the shoulders, forearms (but not the bumper pieces on them), and the feet (there's some little bits of black plastic inside the
heel spurs which are part of the snapping-on parts for the shoulders in combiner mode). There's some hinges inside the backpack that are lighter as well. The rest of the toy, including the backpack cannons, is the darker
dark blue. (UV shows a slight batch variation within the darker blue.)
The cannons are so completely covered in silver paint I almost couldn't tell what plastic they were without doing damage. Silver is also used for
the faceplate, waist, the "buttons" on his shorts, and two lines on either
side of the center pelvis. Between those lines is painted matte black. The visor is painted a slightly orange-ish yellow (mine has chipped paint), and there's a no-border violet Decepticon symbol on the abdomen. Some thin rectangles on the kneecaps are painted olive green.
The neck is a restricted ball joint, but the collar area doesn't really lock down so trying to tip the head forward will make the whole thing lift
up. Smooth swivel waist with a very slight notch to guide it into "un-
turned" position. Pinned hinge and swivel shoulders with shrugging struts
for transformation, bicep swivels, hinge elbows, and wrists that fold down
into the forearms. Pinned hinge and swivel hips, smooth lifting to the sides but ratcheting forwards/backwards with 15 degrees per click. The flaps of pelvis skirt are hinged to get out of the way. Mid-thigh swivels, hinge
knees plus backwards hinges just above them for transformation (the knees
kind of collapse into the boots for combiner mode). The ankles have smooth tilt hinges, and the toes fold upwards 45 degrees at a time on soft
ratchets. The heel spurs are hinged which can help stabilize some poses.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs and there's a 5mm socket at the back of the belt, that's it for 5mm stuff. The barrels of the backpack cannons are 3mm sockets (I continue to be glad I commissioned 3mm peg Fire Blasts from Trent Troop), and there's a 3mm socket on the butt below the belt. Otherwise, it's all nonstandard tabs and slots.
Unless I missed it in the box somehow and the instructions don't mention it at all, Onslaught has no handheld weapon, just the backpack cannons which
I suppose he could use as mortars? No stun gun like in the G1 specs,
though. Looking at pictures of Swindle, he clearly supplies a gun for Bruticus, but Onslaught not having one of his own feels like an admission
they don't expect him to spend any time in robot mode.

Battle Station: I guess this is robot Onslaught's main weapon now,
potent if not exactly something he can carry into a hallway. Basically, it's
a mostly flat platform with a suggestion of a ramp in front, and the turret from vehicle mode up on top of what are pretty obviously combiner thighs and pelvis. Still, it's the thought that counts, and it makes a more credible battle station than the Silverbolt beta unit wall-like thing.
The platform part is 7.25" (18.5cm) long, about 6" (15cm) wide give or take depending on if you count the tabs sticking out the sides, and 1.5"
(4cm) tall. The top of the turret is 5.25" (13.5cm) tall in total. It's the same colors as the trailer, but with more of the olive green and light gray being salient. The silver paint of the combiner waist and pelvis front is a lot more visible than the mere hints seen in trailer mode, but there isn't
any other new paint.
While Onslaught can't even come close to getting his fists onto the trailer hitch grips, the 5mm pegs on eiher side of the turret are just the right separation for Onslaught's fists to grip if you turn the arms sideways
at the bicep swivels. Wrist swivels would've been nice here. Other than the turret, there's not much in the way of connectors, as the pegs on the sides
of the trailer are now being used to hold the arms on. You can rotate the combiner fists and put weapons into them, though.
While Brawn is featured as sitting on the deck (which is now too short
to let the fold-up panels trick work) to add his guns to the overall
firepower, the other two can more or less rest stably on it as well, they
just don't contribute much. I suppose if you fold up those heel panels it
can tilt Blast Off up enough to look like it's a launch pad for him.

Transformation to Combiner: The ramp parts of the trailer turn into arm skeletons in basically the same way as on Menasor and Superion, with the
added bit of the trailer wheels folding in over the inner wrists. The rest
of the trailer is pretty obvious, although you do need to make sure to fold
out the heel panels (I needed a knife for this) before trying to bend the ankles. Folding the chest panel and turret around the torso mode requires shoving very firmly to seat everything. Once it's in, it's in SOLIDLY, and
it hurt my fingers several times in the process of getting the torso freed up again.
Getting the robot thighs and knees collapsed enough into the boots to
make the torso mode work took Excessive Force until I realized you're
supposed to open up the boot panels first, derp. Still takes a fair amount
of force even then, since you need to get some stiff joints bent with short lever arms. The robot feet tab onto the robot shoulders, with the arms
pointed straight back so you can tab them onto the sides of the turrets.
If you transform just the legs part and leave the turret folded up, you basically have a gun walker of some sort.

Combiner Mode: As with Menasor and Superion, you get a sort of spindly combiner without needing any of the "limbs" present. Unlike those other two, though, the boots look distinctively hollow, almost like those "blade runner" prosthetics used by amputee runners. That's because Swindle and Brawl attach to the fronts of the boots (well, become most of the bulk of the boots)
rather than being attacked in back where they barely matter. You can tell
just looking at the legs that you can't swap the two, even if you're willing
to sacrifice the tilt joints, because the connections are mirror images (plus there's an extra tab on the Swindle toe). As indicated earlier, there's four shoulder cannons, as Onslaught's smaller cannons don't stow or otherwise get hidden. The arm frames use the same engineering as the other two recent combiners, but not the same molds.
12.25" (31cm) tall at the head, or 13.75" (35cm) tall at the cannons, which is fortunately not too tall for the shelf I was planning to put this
on. Light gray plastic is used for the head, fists, waist, pelvis (probably all of it, but I'm not going to scrape at paint to be sure of the pelvis
front or armor flaps), hips, and thighs. Light gray plastic is also used for the lower edge of the chestplate, four small gray pieces instead of paint, which as I've already noted is a bit weird. The chestplate is dark neutral gray plastic otherwise, with the fake wheels at the bottom being black
plastic. The arm frames are olive green plastic with black hinge pieces, the boot frames are dark blue plastic. The backpack is the cannon shell from vehicle mode.
Silver paint is used for the pelvis and lower abdomen fronts, the faceplate, and the cannons on the backpack. The robot eyes are gloss red.
The sternum of the chestplate is painted vibrant "Decepticon Purple" with a violet and silver Decepticon symbol centered on it. Most of the rest of the chestplate is painted a dark blue-gray that doesn't try to match the dark
blue plastic. Those patches of dark blue on the sides of the trailer are on the insides of the thighs here, oddly. The right toe tip is painted Swindle yellow, and the left toe tip is painted Brawl olive green (lighter in shade than Bruticus's own olive green).
The neck is a very restricted ball joint, it can really just wiggle a little aside from turning freely. The waist is a smooth swivel, although
it's a little off-center so turning too far starts to look wrong. The arms have the same articulation as the other combiners: ratcheting shoulder hinges to lift to the sides (8 clicks for 90 degrees), ratcheting shoulder swivels
(15 degrees per click), smooth swivels just above the elbows, ratcheting
elbow hinges (8 clicks for 90 degrees), and smooth wrist swivels. The hips
are ratcheting hinge and swivel joints (10 clicks to lift 90 degrees out to
the sides, 10 clicks to lift 90 degrees forwards or backwards, but the buttplate blocks most of the backwards range). The front pelvis skirt panels have smooth hinges to let them get out of the way of the thighs. Smooth
upper thigh swivels, ratchet hinge knees (6 clicks for 90 degrees of bend),
and "ankle" hinges fairly close to the knees that unlock with one snap and
are smooth to a maximum of 45 degrees (the additional smooth hinges from
Brawl and Swindle tend to be ever so slightly out of alignment, which helps stiffen the joint quite a bit). While the toes can technically fold down on transformation hinges, they're fixed in position when Swindle and Brawl are attached.
The arm frames have the same limb-bot connectors as Menasor and Superion do, so you can swap around any of the arm-mounted vehicles on either side. However, they do not have any 5mm sockets on them, unlike Superion and
Menasor (and the screw holes are smaller than 5mm). The fists can hold 5mm pegs, all the connectors on the Onslaught turret are accessible, and Onslaught's own fists have their 5mm sockets pointed backwards on the back as well. Any other connectors depend on the other Combaticons.
Officially, Blast Off takes 13 steps to go from vehicle to limb,
although several of those are "collapse the skeleton arm down, then attach Blast Off and re-extend the arm." You can skip that by just bending a transformation joint so you can attach the vehicle to the upper arm, then
pull it in two and attach the other half separately. Vortex works largely
the same way, just different minor details on dealing with kibble.
The Brawl instructions are 50 steps, and it recommends just removing the leg frame entirely so you don't have to wrestle with the whole combiner to
get things attached. Yeah, I'm glad I followed that one bit of the instructions, even if I puzzled it out from the box back otherwise (I have no idea if I got it exactly right back when I reviewed Brawl, I suspect I had
the robot arms in slightly incorrect positions). Brawl's back cannons just store on the back of the leg, at least for now there's no way to use them as
a credible combiner hand cannon. It's possible Swindle's cannon will have slots for attaching them, though? Once Brawl is attached, the paint on the frame's toe-tip does match Brawl's plastic pretty well.

[Note: My Swindle has not yet shipped, so I'll come back to revisit this section once I've got him. He appears to lug Bruticus's cannon around as a trailer in vehicle mode, so even without any way to attach other weapons to
it this cannon might be sufficient for Bruticus on its own.]

Can Nexus Prime Fit In This Frame? Well, the arm frames work just fine
on Nexus Prime's torso mode, as they connect to the same sort of robot foot rectangle blocks as on Superion and Menasor. Unfortunately, even if you pull all of the awkward backpack stuff out of the way of the turret piece, the connection points are different and it can't even be faked well enough to
avoid just falling apart the moment you let go. I'm not sure you could even create an adapter to make this work.
On the plus side, while trying to make this work, I figured out an improved way to deal with Nexus Prime's robot arms...the tabs on the plates under the fists go into slots on either side of the head, which stabilizes
the arms a lot better, even if it does nothing to help fit into Bruticus's backpack. I guess we need to hope for a redeco of Silverbolt's "beta unit"
to be sold separately if we're going to get Nexus Prime's combiner mode assembled without having to buy a $300 gift set after buying all the limbs (several of which have already been announced as redecos in 2027). The pictures of DNA Designs' Next Prime add-on set do agree with my guess about
the arm placement, at least.

Overall: I think they're finally getting the hang of this style of combiner, although it might just be that Onslaught's altmode presented a
lower degree of difficulty than the others. At least it eases the sting of
the steadily increasing price of Commanders.

Dave Van Domelen, just about done with summer break and back to sensible bedtimes, bleh.

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