If it hasn’t been made clear yet, I genuinely love the Fortnite toys despite never playing the game, and I will be sad to see Jazwares end their run on the line while simultaneously eager to see how Hasbro’s stuff ends up in-hand.
This stuff is such a gloriously multifarious mélange of themes and concepts where every new entry tweaks some different part of my toy-loving brain. Whether it’s animal warriors or food-themed battlers or this sinister astronaut, there’s something for all the voices inside my head.
Dark Voyager has mysterious flavor that reaches out and grabs the kid inside me. His mostly-black attire and helmeted head is the kind of thing I’d want to send back to myself as a kid, because I know little me would dig it as much as fully grown me does.
The figure is mostly black except for some orange accent lines and a few brown bands. There’s an alien symbol on his shoulder and a blue squiggle on his chest, but otherwise the visual interest is in the sculpt and the combo of shiny and matte plastics. You might think that would make him “boring,” but first off I don’t know what that words means, and second the muted color scheme actually adds to the overall “oomph” of the figure. He’s a Dark Voyager, voyaging darkly to wherever light flinches.
DV has the standard articulation setup now familiar with the Jazwares Fortnite line. There are double jointed elbows and knees along with the usual shoulders, hips and rocker ankles. I usually take this moment in the review to mention my hatred of the articulated hands, but this time I’m going to give it a break, because they aren’t completely terrible at holding the weapons. I think it’s more luck than the fact that the hands have become magically better, but I’d still replace them with non-articulated hands in an instant.
The hips could stand a bit more forward motion; the sockets come down a little too much so he doesn’t get a full 90ish degree forward outkick.
The dome head pegs on and off so there’s only a swivel, so you get no up or down, but with the design of the helmet a regular person wouldn’t be looking up or down anyway, so it’s fine.
Underneath the helmet there’s a plain masked head without paint on the eyes or eyebrows. It looks like it might be Havoc’s head—he’s the Firefly-looking guy—but I’m not one hundred percent positive about that. The unpainted head underneath the helmet adds an eerie quality to the figure. I would have been fine with just a completely black helmet, but the addition of a head adds a new dimension to the figure.
For accessories, he comes with his backpack, some kind of grabby-looking melee weapon, sniper rifle, machine gun, bow and arrow with the arrow molded to the bow, and the container and crystal that I believe are in-game power-ups of some kind. They have slots for him to hold them, but he doesn’t excel in that department. On the one hand I admire the number of accessories that each figure comes with, but on the other I find myself just tossing most of them in a bag. I’m more or less here for the figures, and many of them have trouble holding their weapons anyway. That’s ok. The figures are plenty of fun on their own.
Dark Voyager is another fun Fortnite figure in a line that is overrunning with great looking concepts and figures.
