Salus looks just fine as an ambulance. Red and silver paint break up all the white. His windshields are lightly tinted. He rolls just fine on plastic tires. His side view mirrors look to be less fragile than those on TFC Medic. I forgot to photograph him next to another MP car. He is the same length and width as Masterpiece Ironhide, but is taller by a couple millimeters.
Transformation is definitely more difficult than Masterpiece Ironhide. It's not exactly complicated. The legs were easy enough to form from the various panels. The backpack could have been handled better. There is some flexing to get parts past each other and it doesn't seem to clip securely to his back. It just frictions into place. I suppose I could have mistransformed it.
His head sculpt has the right details, but I would have preferred sharper edges. His face is a little too curved for my taste. I like the shape and proportion of his chest more than that of Masterpiece Ironhide. I wish his windshield tinting were darker so you couldn't see through the whole figure. Although I like the general shape of the backpack with the two tires in the middle, I don't like how it doesn't connect to his neck. I'm also not a fan of the legs, which are simply panels surrounding but not attached to the actual leg. If you mess with his feet in the wrong way, the whole leg assembly will explode open.
His head is on a ball joint. The panel his neck rests on is on a hinge, allowing for a larger degree of upward and downward head nodding. This would normally break the sculpt on other figures, but there is no sculpt here anyways. His thumbs are on ball joints. His fingers are single pinned, but his pointing fingers articulate separately from the rest and have a second knuckle. He swivels at the waist, biceps, wrists, and lower legs. His lower leg swivel is ratcheted. He has double jointed elbows, but single jointed knees, which are both ratcheted. If you unclip his abdomen, you can make use of an ab crunch. His hip joints are ratcheted universals. Each foot has a friction rocker and a ratcheted tilt.
The ratchets in his hip joints are spread too far apart, resulting in a very wide A-stance on the first click outward. There is a video on YouTube by pro design, showing how to turn the ratchet joints into friction joints. It involves disassembling the legs, clipping the ratchet arms, and replacing the pins wth M2x12mm screws and bolts. I'm still debating whether to take this irreversible step, but am seriously leaning toward it. I imagine it would dramatically improve his posability, much like Combiner Wars Motor Master / Menasor with Nonnef's ratchets.
His only accessories are two rifles and a bunch of hole covers. The rifles are decent and are the same style as the ones that come with Masterpiece Ironhide. One rifle is grey while the other is painted silver, which I prefer over chrome. Unfortunately, they use the Masterpiece style tabs so are sort of fiddly to fit into his palm slots. At least his thumbs can be moved out of the way. The hole covers aren't the exact same white as his panels, but are close enough. I found a pair of nail clippers was useful for snipping off the remnants of plastic after twisting the covers off their sprues. A colorful instruction card shows where each piece goes. Unfortunately, the sprues aren't colored coded as well. The camera on my phone was handy for enlarging the ridiculously small numbers printed on them. Pay careful attention to aligning the covers correctly in their holes because they do have small details on them for completing panel lines. Except for a pair in either leg (the rear wheel wells), most of these holes wouldn't have really been noticeable in robot mode. Most fold away to the inside of the backpack.
For now, I'm placing Salus on my Masterpiece shelf. He's definitely too large for my CHUG shelf. Once Masterpiece Ratchet arrives, I'm not exactly sure where Salus will end up. I suppose if you don't like having mold mates, he will serve on a Masterpiece display next to Masterpiece Ironhide, or vice versa if you wait for both companies to release their next figures. Salus is not a bad figure. I hope that VooDoo Robots won't turn out to be a one hit wonder and that they have a chance to help fill out the gaps in the Masterpiece line.
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