Dave's Transformers Cyberverse Rant: Warrior Wave 10

Dead End (Sportscar)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Cyberverse/Warrior10

The rest of the wave is reships (repackaged in Dinobots Unite trade
dress).

CAPSULE

$12-16 price range.

Dead End: It's an adequate toy, but feels more like a slightly upgraded
Authentics toy...the $5 class. It's better than any of that class, but not
by a whole lot. Mildly recommended, upgrade to recommended if you're willing
to add a lot of paint yourself.

RANT

Packaging: Standard Warrior blister card, now with the Dinobots Unite
trade dress. (I got this before finding the single new toy in Wave 9, so
while that may technically be the first to have Dinobots Unite on it, it'll
be my second review.)

DECEPTICON: DEAD END
Assortment: E1884
Altmode: Cybertronian Sportscar
Transformation Difficulty: 11 steps
Previous Name Use: G1, Alt, Gen:CW, Arm, En, RotF, TF:A, Prime, Cyberverse
Previous Mold Use: None
Epithet/Gimmick: Blitz Blast
Function: Cynical Enforcer

Packaging: As with most Warriors, just the blister shape holds the robot
into the package, no ties. Unlike Warriors to date, he has a gun, which is
held in by the blister as well.

Robot Mode: Well, aside from the usual hollowness and overly large
boots, it actually does a pretty good job of capturing the details of the
animation model. Not everything is the same *size* as on the animation
model, but it's all there. There's also the usual lack of paint apps
(although it's not as bad as in vehicle mode below), and some of the paints
the toy does get are not quite right.
4.75" (12cm) tall, mostly red and dark gray, with some white and light
gray bits. Very dark gray (almost black) plastic is used for the wheels,
thighs, and pistol. Everything else is bright red plastic. The head is
coated in light gray paint with white for the eyes and yellow for some
"sideburns" between the helmet and the face. (The lack of a second gray
shade on the helmet hurts a lot here.) There's white paint on the chest's
fake windshield and some details on the tops of the forearms, and very dark
gray paint on the fists and some collarbone-area details. Down by the ankles
a bit of the real white windshield paint is visible. The toes themselves
aren't painted, which makes them sort of blend into the windshield panels, if
I do nothing else to this toy I'll at least paint the toes "pavement" gray.
The head turns, but probably shouldn't given how bad it looks from the
back. No waist joint. The shoulders are where about a third of the total
budget probably went. Each strut is connected to the gimmick mechanism
inside the chest and can rotate some (left arm 45 degrees down, right arm 90
degrees down to set for firing the gimmick). The struts themselves have very
stiff transformation hinges that let them bend down to the sides. And then
the struts end in ball and socket joints. It takes some fiddling to get the
arms to stay where you want them after stuff pops back, but the gimmick
doesn't actually *prevent* useful articulation, which puts it head and (pun
intended) shoulders above most Warrior gimmicks. More about the gimmick
later. The elbows bend double on hinges, no wrist joints. Ball joint hips,
hinge knees that bend a bit more than 90 degrees (the boots being twice as
long as the thighs does reduce the effective range of motion), and hinge toes
with a decent range of motion.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, and for once the toy comes with something
to hold. There's 5mm sockets (with collars) on the sides of the boots, and
the screw hole in the back of the pelvis is 5mm in diameter.
The gun, which is a rarity for a Warrior (might be the only one to have
a non-integral weapon), is based on the one he sometimes used in the cartoon,
albeit with the addition of extra pegs and a lack of paint. It's basically a
large pistol with a bit that looks like a thick drum magazine. The gun is
about 1.5" (3.5cm) long, with a 5mm grip at the back end plus three more 5mm
pegs at the same horizontal point, arranged in a cross shape. The side ones
are meant for vehicle mode storage, while the top one doesn't have a defined
use...I suspect it's for inserting into the socket in the back of the pelvis
for storage.

Gimmick: So, the idea here is that you lower the right arm by 90 degrees
until it clicks into place. Once set, the right shoulder strut is held well
enough you can freely pose the ball joint without accidentally triggering the
gimmick. Once set, rotating the left arm down releases the right arm to snap
up 90 degrees. It's a little thing, but I prefer the little gimmicks that
don't get in the way to the more impressive ones that turn the toy into just
a gimmick-delivery system.
There's a sort of secondary gimmick in the left arm. When you lock the
right arm, the left arm does a quick jab. And if you don't have the right
arm locked, you can pull the left down 45 degrees and it'll snap back up for
a punching action.

Transformation: Almost the entire car shell is in the boots, with most
of the hood folded up inside them, and the windshield being partly the soles
of the feet (which does complicate any plans to repaint the windshield). The
rest of the car shell is the backpack, which folds up over the head, while
the chest plate folds up to cover the face and complete the sandwich. The
arms very cleverly bend around and fold up into the small of the back,
although the shoulder struts feel like they're not supposed to bend the way
they do.

Vehicle Mode: Well, it's solid enough, but even if they had put more
into the paint budget it'd look super cheap. The fact that only the
windshield, headlights, and hood faction symbol are painted, though, makes it
look worse than a lot of $5 Authentics in vehicle mode. Still, it might be
worth painting up a bit.
A rather puny 3.5" (9cm) long, mostly red with white windshield and
headlights. The snap-on wheels are very dark gray, all the rest of the car
is bright red plastic. White paint on the windshield and the headlights,
with a warm violet and white outline Decepticon symbol printed at the front
of the hood (the mold lines go around it so that there isn't a seam down the
middle).
There's a big obvious 5mm socket on either side, with a raised collar
that interrupts the flow of the door, and the gun stores on either side
equally well. The snap-on wheels roll reasonably well, and all four stay on
the table at once.

Overall: It's a well-constructed and reasonably fun to fiddle with toy,
it's main flaw is that it looks so CHEAP, suffering very badly from lack of
paints and from hollow bits. It gives a lousy "right out of the blister"
impression as a result, but I did warm to it somewhat over the course of the
review. Still, it feels like a poster boy for "Shrinkflation."

Dave Van Domelen, hopes Snarl is also at least passable.