Toy Review: RotF Bludgeon

Revenge of the Fallen Bludgeon

Waaaay back in 2009, when I first heard that the announced Revenge of the Fallen (ROTF) Bludgeon had made an appearance at some of the specialty stores around Metro Manila, I was itching to get my hands on one. I expected that it would be impossible to get one, having experienced several grueling hunts in a row for Sideswipe, both of the Twins, and the Ice Cream Truck set. After Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was released, competition for Transformers collectors increased about 1000%, since every parent in the country had kids asking for their very own action figure based on their favorite characters. It didn’t help that reports from the States were saying that Bludgeon was pretty hard to find on retail shelves.

Luckily, that wasn’t the case here.

Like Dirge, Brawn, and Lockdown, Bludgeon wasn’t part of the movie cast. That meant that competition from the Mommy market wasn’t forthcoming. That meant I still had collectors and hoarders to deal with.

Apparently not. As it turned out, Playkit, banking on the success they had with the figures that were directly representing characters in the movie, ordered plenty of boxes. Bludgeon and the others that came out at the same time have been warming spaces in Toy Kingdom ever since.

Bad for the Playkit, good for me.

The box is the same as any of the other Voyager Class figures in the second series of movie Transformers. Like the boxes for the Leader Class Optimus Prime, it’s mostly made of plastic, with some carboard for the back and as a frame for the toy inside. The windows are large and give you a fairly wide view of the toy inside, which is in vehicle mode. You can see that the tank lies on another plastic insert so that it is raised off the back of the card at a slight angle. There’s also an abundance of tape and twist ties. Hate hate hate twist ties.

Despite the fancy pinking on the sides of the box, it opens as any standard box would. You can slide out the tray, cardboard this time, and take out the toy. I don’t think the toy requires this much space though. You can see from the pictures that there is a lot of empty in that box. However, I bet mint-on-card (MOC) collectors love this kind of display.

On the back, there’s the requisite product shot and data blurbs, as well as the power guages. Who else misses the red tech specification decoders from the 80’s? Raise your hands, now. The photos are servicable, but completely uninspired.

The figure’s alternate mode is a Japanese Type 90 Kyu-maru, which is the main battle tank of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force. It’s built by Mitsubishi, so you’ve probably seen it in Jackie Chan movies.

The mold seems serviceable, but it doesn’t really look too close to the photos I’ve seen of the real Type 90, which is a lot smoother. This thing has little parts hanging off all over it. Which is actually good. Honestly, I don’t care how close Transformers are to real cars or jets, as long as they look good.

The tank mode has wheels on the treads, which, wonder of wonders, are actually flexible. Parts of them anyway. Thanks to his design, the treads break apart. Some are cast in place, but pieces come loose and hang rom his armor, forming a sort of chainmail. Frankly, it’s awesome.

The turret also turns as a turret should, but there’s no up and down movement. The machine gun on top pivots, but the missle pods do not.

Since he’s a Voyager class toy, he is a little bigger than the Deluxe figures, but not big enough to be true to scale for anything by Legends class figures. He’s dwarfed by the Leader Class Brawl from the first movie (sorry, don’t have a pic of that).

Paint, like with most Transformers toys, is virtually a non-issue. Most of him is cast in color. So it’s either green, orange, or gray. There are some pieces painted black on his body, and they aren’t too bad, but they are flat and featureless paint applications. This lack is especially sad when you have him tank mode, since those orange parts that look good in robot mode look totally out of place in his vehicle form. A little paint would have gone a long way here, Hasbro.

His conversion process is a little tough for beginners, as a Voyager Class toy should be, but once you know where it all goes, it gets easier.

One part I really enjoyed was how his turret becomes a “backpack” that houses his two blades, both his katana and wakizashi. The katana (the longer one) slides right into the barrel of the main gun and the hilt of the sword forms an extension of the barrel. The dagger, fits into a small tube that pops out of the interior of the turret. There are also some cool gears in there as well, so it’s not just a single hinge that opens it. Sweet.

The dagger is a little short for a samurai’s short side sword, but it’s forgivable when a robot looks this awesome:

If you’re familiar with the Transformer toyline, you might remember there was a subline called “The Pretenders” from 1989. These were a group of Transformers who inhabited human form shells. The shells would crack open to reveal a small robot with simple transformation scheme. It was a pretty fun concept and I bought at least 3 of them.

The original Bludgeon was one of them. His pretender shell was that of a skeletal samurai. That’s right, a SKELETAL SAMURAI. I cannot stress how cool this thing looked to me at the time, despite having only 2 points of articulation. This new version has way more than that.

I mean, the term “super articulated” has been thrown around a lot in the toy industry, but this is pretty damned close to my own definition of the term which is “has the ability to kick that other super articulated toy in the face”:

That kick just awesomed that other toy’s face off.

When you look at him, Bludgeon has the equivalent of a swivel neck, swivel/hinge shoulders, an upper arm swivel, double-hinge elbows, swivel/hinge hips, swivel/hinge knees, and hinge ankles. Plus his man skirt is on hinges as well, and the turret is on a swivel. All of that combines for some satisfying play options.

The new robot is an homage to that early shell, while the alt mode is a nod to the robot that was included inside. It’s a skeletal samurai, just like the original, but it has a lot more detail in it’s special roboty regions with gears and pistons and stuff. The whole effect is very impressive and if he was bigger, you could just imagine him slicing his way through Tokyo.

About the only thing I would have changed would be to make the turret removable so it could act like a shield, as it did in the original toy. However, since they gave us a second weapon to occupy his other hand, that’s something I can live without. Heck, with his excellent upper body joints, he can even hold the katana with both hands. OR, he can store both his swords at his side where Hasbro designers included two holes that the blades can fit in.

Seriously, this guy is worth the price (around Php 1,400.00 or so), and since he’s still readily available at suggested retail price, it’s an excellent bargain.

He’s absolutely a Decepticon worthy of standing next to Megatron on your shelf, chopping Autobots to pieces as the Master of Metalliko.