Ocular Max Riot and Furor - Rumble and Frenzy (or Frenzy and Rumble)

Ocular Max Riot and Furor - Rumble and Frenzy (or Frenzy and Rumble)

Although I like the Masterpiece minions for Soundwave, I've always thought they were a bit on the small side. They had to be, of course, to facilitate the tape storage gimmick. With the Ocular Max minions, we can now have the best of both worlds. Furor and Riot are the latest offerings that let me happily replace official Masterpiece figures.

Their cassette modes are back to the unpainted finish of Jaguar instead of the semi-painted finish of Volture and Buzzard. Like all the others, they are line-filled messes. This time, provided stickers let you cover both sides. I'll never have them in tape mode again so I will definitely not be bothering with the stickers.

Transformation to either mode is pretty simple. There are a lot of tabs, but everything lines up fairly easily.

Their heads are on ball joints. They can look up and down a decent amount. Their shoulders are on hinged ball joints that let them raise their arms straight up into the air. They swivel at their biceps, waists, and thighs. They do not have wrist swivels. Their thumbs are fixed and the rest of their fingers articulate as a single unit. They have double-jointed elbows and can almost perform full curls. They have an ab crunch to facilitate their pile driver gimmick. Their hips are on universal joints. They can preform full front and side splits. Their single-jointed knees only let them curl their legs to 90 degrees. Their feet are on ball joints.

Their accessories include a pair of rifles each, a pair of pile drivers each, a display base each, a spare head each, and a cassette case each. Their rifles are covered in metallic silver paint. They hinge at the barrels and wings to facilitate storage in tape mode, but drive my OCD crazy because they are always flopping to odd angles. The hammers slot over their arms and are motorized. Unfortunately, batteries are not included. Their spare heads have a more serious expression than the default smirk faces.

These guys will stand on my Ocular Max shelf and sub for Masterpiece minions. I'm really glad someone is giving us properly scaled figures for robot mode. I am more than content to leave a couple of the official ones in tape mode in Soundwave's and KFC Transistor's chests. Only a few more minions to go. I'm still crossing my fingers Blaster's minions will get the same treatment.