I want to love this toy and it has a ton of good things going on. The sculpting work is fantastic, the colors are stunning and the size is pretty great, to me. Very big but not as big as the city bots is an appropriate place for Tidal Wave to occupy. Articulation is fantastic, proportions are spot-on and once it's in aircraft carrier mode there's some major presence even if this version is just a static brick with 0 features in that mode.
Then there's the bad. I look at this one little runway flap that folds down in arm mode and it encapsulates all the bad stuff. It has no function outside of aesthetics, but even then, when you flip it up in aircraft carrier mode, there's no paint. The purple line that leads up to it just ends, abruptly, at the seam. Once you get out of the shallow end and dive into the depths with this toy, you see compromises all over the place that nearly sink it.
I didn't think the partsforming would bother me in-hand, but it's been a few days and it still does. As someone that couldn't have cared less about add-on parts for that soulless Legacy Armada Megatron, the compromises made to accommodate that one feature are glaring. A choice was obviously made to make that work no matter what, and in my opinion, it was not the correct choice. Almost every problem I have with the toy comes down to "that had to happen for the Dark Fleet to work" and that just stinks. Why did this toy have to suffer to give Armada Megs an add-on?
-Kanrabat- wrote:He feels HEAVY and DENSE. He may be the smallest titan height-wise, but contrary to all the previous ones, he does not feel hollow at all.
They used just a little too much of that junky, prone to photodegradation plastic for me to agree. A majority of the figure feels nice but then I hit these massive blocks of cheese they used for the feet, hips, upper torso boat piece joints and knee joints and it makes me sad. Maybe it's a Me problem but that unpolished, grainy, flexible stuff is the worst material. Then there's the fact that I need to do surgery on it so the knees don't explode after a handful of transformations. Guess it's been long enough since Trypticon for yet another lesson to be forgotten.
Ultimately I can't tell if this was designed by someone that treated it like a homework assignment they didn't want to do, or if the compromises for the Dark Fleet were really just that costly. Take away the partsforming and make one or two improvements to materials and stuff like the single chunk front skirt and it's as close to a home run as could be expected from a mainline toy these days. As is, it's a
just ok toy that is frustratingly close to being more, but not quite there.
To be fair, this is how I've felt about 95% of the mainline since probably Siege, maybe even PotP, so if that adds grains of salt for you, take them.
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