Never bring a Walther to an Abrams fight.
While the movie fervor has about run it’s course, a left a lot of unsold Drifts in it’s place, the Generations sub-theme Combiner Wars is starting to gain momentum, with the first Gestalt team, some Legends class figures, and this big sumbitch here making their way into stores.
Megatron has been easily the most anticipated….well, “leader” Leader Class in some time. He often comes with a fair share of complications anyway, not the least of which revolves around his alt-mode being a handgun. I’m going to avoid the politics here for the most part, but everything about toys and hoplophobia usually ends in stupid. But in this case, I’m somewhat grateful that this encourages designers to give Megatron a vehicle alt-mode, because that solves a lot of problems in terms of size and style that the gun-modes just plain do not help with.
As packaged in bot-mode, it’s clear Megatron was intended to be a big damn figure. His proportions skew larger than most leader-class figures in recent years, meaning his “scale” aligns him more with Masterpiece than with his Combiner Wars companions. Jetfire did this to some extent, with his proportions basically matching the MP Seeker Jets, but Megs goes further. The most obvious example is the head- instead of the usual pin-head on a hulking body, Megatron’s head is rather proportionate to the rest of his size, making him a large (but maybe not huge) bot among similarly proportioned ones.
And speaking of that noggin, it’s one of the best sculpted ones in years, and easily the best Megs has had in a looong time. The rest of his robot sculpt follows suit, with lots of nice detail work evoking his original mode strewn throughout, as well as his comic iterations, for example the tank tread pieces on his back are pivoted, so you can give him the more War Within styled look, or just tuck them behind his head. Watch the paint, though- mine had some rub marks on his chestplate.
He stops short of excellent though due to the arm cannon. It’s needed to serve as the cannon barrel for tank mode, so there are concessions made rightly so, but it’s mostly too thin and odd-shaped to really sell it.
Articulation is a lot like that as well, he hits a lot of the right notes but misses a couple notches. The upper body is great, especially with the neck joint, and even though they’re a bit odd looking, his shoulder joints work pretty well. I’m more let down by the restricted movement in the hips (due to the cut of that pelvic plate) and the somewhat limited range in his knees. This means there probably won’t be a throne in this leader’s future.
The vehicle mode is really nicely done, with a functioning turret (hot damn!) and functioning treads (double hot damn!) that give Megs some excellent playability that his altmode’s usually lack. He is patterned after the M1 Abrams, which is also what the debunked MP sketch used, and that fits his style and personality nicely. The telescoping cannon and Chobham-style armor help make it unique, which is nice among so many tank-bots. As a mode that will likely be overlooked by most buyers, it’s still nice to see that it was given some real attention.
While not perfect, at the $45 price point, this leader hits a lot of the right notes, and delivers some solid value. As is almost customary these days, I wouldn’t mind seeing some add-on kits address things like the arm cannon, or adding some more MP-like articulated hands, but even out of the box this figure will fill the Emperor of Destruction slot for many collections, particularly those that include Masterpiece figures.
