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Monday, April 4, 2016

Sunday, April 3, 2016

Maketoys Rover - Streetwise

I find Maketoys has more fun transformations in their Masterpiece line, but I still enjoy their combiner line for the aesthetics and look forward to having another combiner on my shelf.

I wouldn't mind owning a car that looks like this. The rear windows don't look to be in quite the right position so I may have missed something during transformation. The vehicle rolls perfectly well on plastic tires. The SHERIFF signs and stars are nicely applied. The light bars are colored translucent plastic. The front and rear windshields aren't tinted enough, so the insides are visible. The side windows are silver painted.

Transformation is less fun than on Axel. The head is on a collapsing panel, which I hate. The legs seem easy enough to get into position. There is a sliding joint on either feet, and the rear windshield is hinged so you can get the feet into position. The arms are a pain. The sliding panels don't seem toleranced well so I had to wiggle and yank a lot. Going from robot to vehicle mode is stressful. Ultimately, you have to line up a bunch of tabs on various pieces and squeeze the whole thing together, sweating as things snap, crackle, and pop into place.

Like Axel, Rover has an asymmetrical head sculpt. He has a silver painted face with a blue painted visor. There is a decent amount of line work throughout his body. It is broken up by tinted and colored transparent plastic. I'm not a big fan of the huge gap between his chest and neck, but it's only visible from above. Thankfully his shoulders are not as dramatic as TFC Gumball and do not hinder articulation.

His head is on a ball joint. His shoulders and feet are on hinged ball joints. He has double jointed elbows. His wrists and hips are also on ball joints. His hands are fixed in an open grip. He swivels at the biceps, waist, and upper thighs. He seems more easily posable than Axel, probably because his hips and feet have more standard engineering.

He comes with two rifles that are mirror pieces of each other. I think you need to be careful to peg them into the appropriate hands to prevent damaging the hands. The pegs themselves are half circles. They can combine into a double barrel rifle. There is some molded detail but no paint. There are slots just behind the rear doors for the guns to peg onto in vehicle mode, but I would not recommend it. At least on mine, the holes are not properly sized, and the panel itself is pretty thin so I'm leery of applying too much pressure to force them in.

Although I did not enjoy either transformation, I like Rover a lot more than Axel as a figure. The individual bot aesthetic doesn't really go with the Fall of Cybertron series, but once I form him into Guardia, I think that he, Fall of Cybertron Bruticus, Maketoys Giant and Qauntron will make an impressive shelf of combiners.