Zob's Thoughts on Revenge of the Fallen Constructicon Devastator
Zobovor
he first came out in August, but I couldn't justify spending $100 on
the toy when I knew that eventually he'd drop in price. $80 is the
lowest I've seen him for at retail, so I figured I'd better grab him
because stores will be marking prices back up after Christmas. (The
Leader-class toys at Walmart have already jumped back up from thirty-
five dollars to $44.88) Lately I've been buying up toys here and
there that I really don't need, and it occurred to me that if I took
back the ones I didn't want I could get about $50 in store credit. As
far as I was concerned, that money had already been spent, so I've
managed to convince myself that I "really" only spent $30 on
Devastator. (Selective economics is how I manage to sleep at night.)
Devastator looks like he comes assembled in the packaging, but he
actually doesn't. His limbs are affixed in their approximate
positions but they're tied down to the plastic tray separately,
presumably as a prevention measure against breakage during shipping.
He's wedged in there really good with so many twist ties that I lost
track of them, and being unfamiliar with the toy meant I wasn't sure
how the parts were supposed to move or detach, so extracting them all
was somewhat difficult, even with a pair of wire cutters. There's
also some one-time consumer assembly required of the individual
vehicles—Mixmaster's cab nose is packaged separately, as is
Scavenger's shovel scoop, probably to get Devastator to fit a little
better in the package. Once you snap these parts in place there's no
reason to remove them, but they still come apart fairly easily. The
toy comes with a separate addendum to the instructions that explains
this, suggesting it wasn't part of the original plan.
Where most of the Revenge of the Fallen toys are incredibly complex,
Devastator is clearly made with younger kids in mind. He has a
minimum of moving parts, with typically only three or four steps
required to get each vehicle into Devastator mode. This may have been
one of the reasons Hasbro opted to do vehicle-only Constructicons
without robot modes—vehicle-to-robot toys like Mixmaster and Rampage
are maddening enough; adding a third mode would have meant even more
complexity, which makes for frustrated kids and lots of consumer
returns to the store, which in turn means a lot less profit for
Hasbro. Too many moving parts might have made the Devastator mode
unstable, too—and he's really heavy, about ten pounds. While I'd
place the appropriate age level for most of the Revenge of the Fallen
toys at maybe 11 or 12, Devastator could easily be mastered by a five-
year-old. (Hey, just like it says on the toy packaging! What a
concept!)
Rampage is roughly the same size as the Deluxe version, though his
shovel is smaller, the side vents are noticeably more pronounced, and
his front safety gate is missing (though there's some paint deco in
its place that's meant to suggest its presence). His shovel does
pivot a little bit, but the range of motion is really limited. The
hydraulics don't work on this version, and in fact the pistons pop off
really easily. His treads are plastic instead of rubber, and he's got
little rolling pins underneath him to propel him along. He bears the
inscription AN-KA 111308. He's got six moving parts if you include
both his rollers. This is a seriously kid-friendly vehicle, and if
you forgive the pop-off and easily-lost pistons, it can hold up to
lots of rough play in a way that the Deluxe toy simply cannot.
Long Haul, by contrast, is much smaller than his Voyager counterpart,
approximately the same size as the G2 Autoroller named Dirtbag. This
in itself is strange, since Long Haul was shown to be one of the
larger Constructicons during the trip they took to retrieve Megatron
in the movie. I guess it makes sense that he'd be about the same size
as Rampage since they both turn into Devastator's legs. Anyway, he's
got radically different proportions than the Voyager toy, with a
skinny truck bed and a narrow wheel base, with only four wheels total
(the Voyager has two extras in the back, like G1 Long Haul). He's
also missing the safety gate around the front of the cab. He lacks
all the undercarriage junk that the fully transformably toy's got, and
he's got a deeper truck bed, but he also has a large pair of
protruding struts jutting out of his front bumper that do spoil his
vehicle form a bit, as well as the large octagonal knob that serves as
a connector when he combines. (They form Devastator's toes, and I
doubt they could have been significantly shortened.) Not including
his wheels, he's got three moving parts.
Mixmaster is the only other Constructicon to have a transformable
Hasbro counterpart right now, but this version is significantly larger
than the Voyager toy. I guess if you wanted to shoehorn it into an
existing price point you could call it a particularly large Ultra toy,
but even that might be pushing it. He has a lot of the same details
as the transforming toy, but some stuff is molded differently (the
side mirrors are stuck to the sides of the cab instead of protruding)
and some paint operations are different (the centers of his wheels are
black instead of silver and his exhaust pipes are blue, like the rest
of his cab). He's got a tiny Decepticon symbol on the protruding
block on his hood, which is the toy-equivalent of the bulldog hood
ornament he had in the movie, but the giant symbols on his mixing drum
are missing this time.
Mixmaster is also the only Constructicon with an electronics package.
He makes a transformation sound when you unfold him, and by himself,
he's designed to make the sound of a truck rumbling. He's motion-
sensitive, which means all you have to do is roll him along on the
ground to activate the sound, no button-pushing required. He's
incredibly sensitive, though, and responds to me typing on my keyboard
when he's on the desk, or the cats running past when he's on the
ground. He's been steadily rumbling here and there ever since I got
him out of the package, and I can't wait to get him back into
Devastator mode to shut him the hell up because it's really kind of
obnoxious.
He's slightly less kid-friendly, mainly because of the little wing-
flaps that pop up on his drum. My two-year-old has already managed to
pop off one of the flaps and lose it. The hardest part of Devastator
is trying to figure out how to lock the back flap on Mixmaster to
cover up Devastator's face. This vehicle only has two moving parts
required for the transformation, plus four more for the head flaps.
That said, there's actually a great deal of complexity in the way
Devastator's face opens up, but it's all done automatically with the
pull of a lever so it doesn't affect his difficulty.
Scavenger is huge and chunky. If you took the Voyager-class
Demolishor toy and tripled it in size, you'd be pretty close to the
mark. (I know Demolishor isn't one of the Constructicons, but his
vehicle mode is identical to Scavenger's in the movie, so it's as fair
a comparison as any.) Scavenger, alone, is comparable in size to
other toys in the Supreme class. There are very, very few
Transformers vehicles this big. (I'm reminded of Hauler-Bot more than
anything else.) His undercarriage is basically hollow because that's
where Mixmaster attaches to him, and the insides of his treads are
quite visibly unpainted, but all in all he's still a very large and
very impressive vehicle. He rolls along on four faux wheels embedded
within his treads, but the armor panel that folds underneath him
provides almost zero ground clearance, so it catches on carpeting
easily and is better left swung back behind him.
He's a little more complex than the others, with 13 moving parts, only
five of which are required for the transformation (three are the
shovel arm and the other four are points of articulation in the
shoulders for Devastator). He locks together really well in vehicle
mode so he's very tough, though I found his safety rails kept popping
off in Devastator mode when I was looking for some way to handle him.
His scoop also has a really large hole in it, so the shovel arm can
collapse into itself more completely (and possibly so kids won't
suffocate by sticking the scoop over their mouths). He's got the
inscription SCVNGR tampographed on his right side and THK-1139 on his
left. (This is obviously a reference to the George Lucas film called
THX-1138, but I haven't decided whether or not somebody got it wrong
on purpose, maybe to avoid somebody at Lucasfilm getting mad, or
whether they were just working from a grainy screen shot and read the
alphanumeric characters wrong.)
Scrapper has no transforming toy equivalent right now so I can't
compare him to anything, but he's a bit larger than the guys who form
the legs, just slightly bigger than the other G2 Autoroller named
Roadblock. His shovel doesn't move at all in this mode, though it
does have moving parts that are required for the transformation—but
this involves taking everything apart. You can turn him into a weird
hybrid three-shoveled machine that I guess is pretty cool, in a
Vehicon kind of way. He's got eight moving parts as required for the
transformation, plus a ninth that only comes into play as Devastator's
elbow joint once he's combined. Unlike the guys who form the legs, he
can become either arm of Devastator.
Hightower is completely different from any Transformers toy I've ever
owned before so I really have absolutely nothing to compare him to at
all, not even other construction vehicles. He's terribly chunky and
just about indestructible, though it seems like you could probably pop
off his crane arm if you really tried. He has the inscription 40777,
which seems like it's probably a M*A*S*H* reference, but maybe I'm
looking for patterns where none exist. Something I really like about
him is that his Devastator claw is designed to look like the shovel
scoop of a construction vehicle, even though he doesn't use this scoop
at all in vehicle mode (it's completely hidden underneath him). He's
got nine moving parts if you count the three joints in his claw (it
has an articulated "thumb" and two "fingers") plus a tenth that can be
used as Devastator's elbow.
Combining them into Devastator really isn't tricky, since all of the
vehicles essentially have either a transformed or untransformed state,
with very little variance. The two legs, for example, are designed to
support Devastator in a permanent bent-legged pose—while it's possible
to put the legs in different positions, they don't support
Devastator's weight as well. He does stand on two legs without
requiring additional support, in the event you don't like his four-
limbed gorilla walk from the movie. When he's fully assembled, he
stays together really well, though he is considerably top-heavy so he
won't stay upright during aggressive kid-play. The main gimmick of
the toy is the opening mouth, which (as anyone who's tested out the
"try me" window already knows) activates his light-up eyes and the
lights inside his mouth, identified as his Vortex Grinder by Hasbro.
His gaping maw is so huge that you can stuff either the RPM or the
Legends versions of Mudflap and Skids comfortably inside with room to
spare. (I forget which of them got eaten in the movie. In my
personal canon, they both end up getting ground into shrapnel
fragments. Hey, I can dream, right?) His lower jaw pieces do pop off
under pressure, which means a substantially less threatening-looking
monster robot should they go wayward, but he's still substantially
more sturdy than most of the Transformers toys from the past ten years
or so.
The lack of robot modes is really the biggest sticking point with this
toy. It seems like some robot parts could have been incorporated into
the design of each vehicle without adversely affecting their ability
to combine. Of course, that would have meant more moving parts, which
would make the toy more difficult for kids to figure out, and also
less stability in the combined mode. It seems like even without
adding a lot of articulation, some robot-specific sculpting could have
been added somewhere, though I admit that a bunch of half-assed RPM-
style robot styling may have been a pretty cheap cop-out, and arguably
worse than toys with dedicated vehicle-to-Devastator transformations.
Also, transforming toys without robot forms are unusual, but not
completely unheard of—Voltron, for example, was arguably just as cool
as Transformers back in the day, even though the lions didn't do
anything except combine with each other.
I think the important thing to keep in mind is that the toy is easy to
manipulate, which makes it fun rather than frustrating. There are way
too many Transformers toys that are very cleverly engineered, and
present an interesting challenge to my adult mind, but are also
complete failures as children's playthings because of their
complexity. Devastator isn't a challenge to me by any stretch of the
imagination, but he's also not frustrating at all. He's pretty darn
cool, actually. He brings the fun back to Transformers toys in a way
that we don't often get these days, except in that rare breed of
Transformers that are designed specifically for kids. (I remember a
time when they were all that way. I'm not saying I don't like the
occasional toy designed specifically with collectors in mind, but
there's such an enormous difference in how I deal with the two types
of toys. With Masterpiece Skywarp, I handle him so carefully and
delicately, being careful not to break his rudders or snap off a tab
or use too much pressure. With Devastator, I don't mind if my toddler
races Mixmaster and Scrapper across the carpet while making little
"vroom, vroom" sounds. That's what these things are meant for. And I
think it's great.
Zob
Chad Rushing
>
> <main review snipped>
>
> I think the important thing to keep in mind is that the toy is easy to
> manipulate, which makes it fun rather than frustrating. There are way
> too many Transformers toys that are very cleverly engineered, and
> present an interesting challenge to my adult mind, but are also
> complete failures as children's playthings because of their
> complexity. Devastator isn't a challenge to me by any stretch of the
> imagination, but he's also not frustrating at all. He's pretty darn
> cool, actually. He brings the fun back to Transformers toys in a way
> that we don't often get these days, except in that rare breed of
> Transformers that are designed specifically for kids. (I remember a
> time when they were all that way. I'm not saying I don't like the
> occasional toy designed specifically with collectors in mind, but
> there's such an enormous difference in how I deal with the two types
> of toys. With Masterpiece Skywarp, I handle him so carefully and
> delicately, being careful not to break his rudders or snap off a tab
> or use too much pressure. With Devastator, I don't mind if my toddler
> races Mixmaster and Scrapper across the carpet while making little
> "vroom, vroom" sounds. That's what these things are meant for. And I
> think it's great.
Thanks for the thorough review! I don't plan on buying this set, but
it was interesting to read your detailed opinion on it nonetheless.
As for your comment about Devastator being "pretty darn cool," that's
how I felt about most of the FABs from the first movie. (I haven't
gotten any of them from the second movie.) They all had a
recognizable robot mode and vehicle mode with lots of surface details,
and none of them were so complex as to be frustrating. My rule these
days is that I should be able to intuitively transform a toy in 30
seconds or less while not having to worry about breaking it on
accident, and the FABs met those requirements for me. I guess most
Legend-sized toys from the movies would meet these requirements, too.
So, did you purchase any of the FAB toys from the first or second
movie? If so, how did you think they measured up to their Deluxe,
Voyager, or Leader-sized equivalents?
- Chad
Alden Bates
> He bears the inscription AN-KA 111308.
I wonder what happened on November 13 last year that that's a
reference to!
Alden
Zobovor
> Thanks for the thorough review! I don't plan on buying this set, but
> it was interesting to read your detailed opinion on it nonetheless.
I do need to make one minor correction—the toy weighs five pounds, not
ten. They ship two to a case, and I had been thinking about how much
a shipping case would weigh (and thus the preventative measures they
took in shipping him in a disassembled state) and somehow I transposed
my numbers.
> So, did you purchase any of the FAB toys from the first or second
> movie? If so, how did you think they measured up to their Deluxe,
> Voyager, or Leader-sized equivalents?
The only Fast Action Battlers I own are Frenzy the CD player (who has
no equivalent toy in the main line) and Arcee (who I only bought
because the Deluxe version is so needlessly frustrating). I'd
probably enjoy a lot of the other toys, but I decided going into this
that I was either going to collect all the movie toys or only get one
toy of each character per movie. I ended up doing the latter, which
suits my budget better since there are lots of other things I like to
buy (Star Wars, Cars, random eBay goodies).
The really embarrassing part of all this is that it turns out my wife
had already bought me Devastator, intending it as a Christmas gift. I
hadn't seen anything that was the right size or shape under the tree,
so I'd assumed I wasn't getting him. I feel kind of sheepish now.
Zob
Gustavo Wombat
> So I got Devastator today. I had the money set aside to get him when
> he first came out in August, but I couldn't justify spending $100 on
> the toy when I knew that eventually he'd drop in price. $80 is the
> lowest I've seen him for at retail, so I figured I'd better grab him
> because stores will be marking prices back up after Christmas.
He sounds like a lot of fun. I eagerly await the devouring of minicons
and legends.
I am waiting for him to go on deep clearance, but given that I haven't
seen very many hogging shelfspace anywhere, this might be a mistake.
Gustavo!
Onslaught Six
> Long Haul, by contrast, is much smaller than his Voyager counterpart,
> approximately the same size as the G2 Autoroller named Dirtbag. This
> in itself is strange, since Long Haul was shown to be one of the
> larger Constructicons during the trip they took to retrieve Megatron
> in the movie. I guess it makes sense that he'd be about the same size
> as Rampage since they both turn into Devastator's legs.
The Wiki is in shambles over this--apparently, Devastator in the movie
is made up of like three or four *entirely extraneous* Constructicons,
including two or three different bulldozers/shovel loaders and a
yellow dump truck. The "Rampage leg" is actually made up of two
vehicles, supposedly.
> Mixmaster is the only other Constructicon to have a transformable
> Hasbro counterpart right now, but this version is significantly larger
> than the Voyager toy.
I'd say Scav counts, being Demmy in all respects. I guess.
> Scrapper has no transforming toy equivalent right now so I can't
> compare him to anything, but he's a bit larger than the guys who form
> the legs, just slightly bigger than the other G2 Autoroller named
> Roadblock.
I wish we got a Voyager of him, he's such a kickass design.
> Hightower is completely different from any Transformers toy I've ever
> owned before so I really have absolutely nothing to compare him to at
> all, not even other construction vehicles. He's terribly chunky and
> just about indestructible, though it seems like you could probably pop
> off his crane arm if you really tried. He has the inscription 40777,
> which seems like it's probably a M*A*S*H* reference, but maybe I'm
> looking for patterns where none exist.
I wish we got a full-size toy of him, too, mind. He's got that awesome
crazy Hannibal Lecter facemask, and the fiddly little T-Rex arms.
> Something I really like about
> him is that his Devastator claw is designed to look like the shovel
> scoop of a construction vehicle, even though he doesn't use this scoop
> at all in vehicle mode (it's completely hidden underneath him).
That would be because a shovel scoop guy makes up his hand in the
movie, as above.
> His gaping maw is so huge that you can stuff either the RPM or the
> Legends versions of Mudflap and Skids comfortably inside with room to
> spare. (I forget which of them got eaten in the movie. In my
> personal canon, they both end up getting ground into shrapnel
> fragments. Hey, I can dream, right?)
It was Mudflap. I may not have liked the movie, but I remember it all
well.
> The lack of robot modes is really the biggest sticking point with this
> toy. It seems like some robot parts could have been incorporated into
> the design of each vehicle without adversely affecting their ability
> to combine.
The problem, Hasbro claims, is that it'd be impossible to have
specific parts for either robot or combined design that didn't wholly
compromise either mode. Typically, the designers have enough problems
doing stuff like this just with regular combiners they design
themselves--how many combiners have we had where some guys have crappy
altmodes, robot modes, look like cruddy robot limbs, or all three?--so
you can imagine the problems they had trying to make them look like
ROTF's designs, which, in spite of all that was claimed, have *never*
adhered all that strictly to physical limitations.
(Watch Prime transform sometime--his wheels just sorta shimmy around
until they get to where they need to be.)
> Also, transforming toys without robot forms are unusual, but not
> completely unheard of—Voltron, for example, was arguably just as cool
> as Transformers back in the day, even though the lions didn't do
> anything except combine with each other.
The other big thing is that, in spite of what we all 'expect,' none of
the Constructicons who form Devastator in the movie are ever shown
transforming into their robot modes, so Dev is even screen accurate.
TigerMegatron
A better fit for me,is the 3 voyagers & 1 deluxe that transform.
I also plan on getting the legends figures that transform & combine to
form devestator.
Tim Skirvin
> I am waiting for him to go on deep clearance, but given that I haven't
> seen very many hogging shelfspace anywhere, this might be a mistake.
$50 at Sam's Club.
- Tim Skirvin (tski...@killfile.org)
--
http://wiki.killfile.org/ Skirv's Homepage <FISH>< <*>
http://wiki.killfile.org/archives/cows/ Skirv's Cows
Zobovor
> > Scrapper has no transforming toy equivalent right now so I can't
> > compare him to anything
> I wish we got a Voyager of him, he's such a kickass design.
It doesn't make any sense to me that we're not getting transforming
versions of all the Constructicons. Is it just because not all of
them appear in robot mode during the course of the movie?
> The other big thing is that, in spite of what we all 'expect,' none of
> the Constructicons who form Devastator in the movie are ever shown
> transforming into their robot modes, so Dev is even screen accurate.
I was really appalled at first when Hasbro announced that they were
going to "force" me to buy both the robot-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-
Devastator versions of the toys, but the revelation that none of the
guys who form Devastator ever turn into robots in the actual film made
it somehow more palatable. Like you said, it is accurate to what we
see in the movie.
Oh, something else that I wanted to mention was that quite some time
ago, I made an observation that Hasbro was using plastic plugs to hide
the screws on their Littlest Pet Shop toys (my daughter owns scads of
these things) and how much I wanted to see them start doing this with
Transformers toys too, since the visible screws in their bodies really
does spoil the fantasy that these are gigantic robots from outer
space. Well, they finally did start doing this—the Scavenger
component to Devastator has numerous plastic plugs that nicely cover
up the screw holes, making them nearly invisible. Coincidence or no,
I love it when Hasbro takes one of my ideas and runs with it!
Zob
Zobovor
wrote:
> I am waiting for him to go on deep clearance, but given that I haven't
> seen very many hogging shelfspace anywhere, this might be a mistake.
Alas, he was still $80 at Walmart a week after Christmas, but now he's
back up to $98.88.
Zob