I love army building as part of my action figure collecting, and since I only grabbed one of the Hydra Soldiers from the Mandroid series, I was very excited to see this two-pack announced at San Diego Comic-Con. My initial impression was that I wished that the pack was two regular-sized soldiers, but having it in hand, I actually appreciate the larger enforcers. Let’s take a look!
The figures come packaged in a nice matte black window box that shows off all of the figures and goodies you get in the pack.
The pack consists of two figures, three rifles, one rocket launcher, one knife, four extra heads, and an extra flack jacket.
The weapons are all cast in a fairly solid gray plastic that has a slight metallic finish to it. They are all reused from previous releases, but that doesn’t bug me. I would have liked a sidearm for a little more variety, but that’s nitpicking. I really like that the rifle with the big removable barrel has the Hydra symbol tampo’d on there.
The enforcer reuses a lot of Nuke from the Giant-Man series, even down to the flack jacket with knife and holster and one of the unmasked heads. It works really well repainted in Hydra colors. The flack jacket is removable, but I don’t love how it looks without it on. One downside is that he doesn’t have trigger fingers.
The masked head is reused from Captain Britain and makes a decent stand-in for the regular Hydra goon mask, but I miss those bubble goggle eyes. It does match the box art pretty well. The Nuke head has a neat scar painted on one side of the face and ended up being my favorite for the Enforcer. The last head looks to be a repaint of the comic Drax from the Guardians of the Galaxy box set, but I’m not sure. He’s got that old-school G.I. JOE thing going on where his hair and beard are all the same length. That ended up as my least favorite.
The regular soldier is pretty familiar if you have the Mandroid series version, though there are some differences. The mask line on the goggle head is actually painted more like the traditional Hydra soldier look where the bridge of the nose is not covered. He also has the cool Hydra symbol decal on the shoulder where the original figure did not. In the below shot, the new figure is on the left. Fortunately, the colors match up pretty well on the body, less so on the straps, boots and gloves, but it’s close enough for me.
This figure also has his own flack jacket, which is a nice way to add additional variety.
The alternate heads are the helmet from the SHIELD agent and the more Udon-style Taskmaster hood. These are kind of fun, but I think I would have preferred the regular head with a couple of different expressions, maybe a screaming head sculpt or Bob, Agent of Hydra from the old Deadpool books.
Overall, this pack is really quite nice. There was a little paint sloppiness on the helmet for the regular soldier, but otherwise the paint was pretty good. The variety of pieces can really open up your Hydra army, and the big guys ended up being way more fun to play with than I was anticipating. I could buy more of the smaller soldier, but I think I have enough of the big guy with my two sets.
