Toy Review: Iron Man 2 Fury of Combat Box Set

09/30/10

Fury of Combat Boxset

It seems like I’ve been doing a lot of reviews for box sets featuring Iron Man lately. There are the Marvel Universe (MU) box sets (the 2-pack with Punisher and the 3-pack with Silver Surfer and Daredevil), then there Iron Man 2 (IM2) line’s K Mart exclusives; Proving Ground and Advanced Tactical Armor 3-packs. I’ve also talked about the Target’s Armored Assault boxset, one of 2 sets that include Hammer-tech drones.

This time around, I’m tackling the Toys ‘R’ Us exclusive “Fury of Combat” 4-pack which features 2 Hammer-tech “Ground Assualt” drones, a re-colored Mark VI, and a Sam Jackson Nick Fury figure. Can you say “Honey, where is my supersuit?”

I like the art on the box this time out, but it’s sad that they didn’t work it more into the design of the thing. The art is contained within the two side panels, one with Nick Fury, and the other with the Mark VI suit and the Drones. If you cut them off, they’d make great bookmarks. You know, a piece of cardboard used to save your place in a book?

Nevermind. Kids these days, honestly!

The back has the requisite boring Hasbro photography and the by now familiar HUD (Heads Up Display) motif of the IM2 line. The front is pretty much just one huge window to show off the figures.

It’s all very ho-hum, but then box sets don’t usually have a whole lot of thougth put into them. It does, however, come with a nice backdrop of a ruined cityscape if you’re the sort who likes to pose figures in front of a diorama.

Sadly, Hasbro went and split the inner tray in two, with the Iron Man armor and the drones on one tray with the backdrop, and Nick Fury on the other side in his own little compartment with a plain blue background. Why, Hasbro?

Happily, this time around, Hasbro mitigated some of my rancor by including a 2 “new” figures, as well as providing a duplicate of an obvious “army builder” target.

Army building is a toy collector term for the process of collecting multiple examples of the same toy in order to, well, build an army. You’ll see this a lot for Cobra Vipers, Star Wars Clone Troopers, and other similar groups. Since the Hammeroids are shown in the film to number 32, you know that these figures are going to be a target of collectors.

While it sucks that Hasbro decided to include half of the Hammeroid figures in box sets, making it tougher to complete a set, let alone army build, at least THIS set has 2 of the Ground Assault Drones, making it a more appealing buy than the Armored Assault box set.

If you have one of the Hammeroids, you’ll be familiar with the way they’re all set up. There’s a base figure upon which various accoutrements are attached. The Sea Assault figure had a small backpack and the shoulder mounted missle pods. These Ground Assault Drones have a back mounted artillery cannon and differently equipped forearms.

While they look good at rest, there are some things you’ll need to look out for. First off is the fact that it’s not really movie accurate. The Army drones in the movie had guns that swung upwards and were stored on their backs. The guns on the figures will only point forward and swing down, over the figure’s chest.

Considering that they’re supposed to serve as either artillery or anti-aircraft weapons (from what I saw in the film anyway), it seems ridiculous that you can’t point the barrels UP.

The second thing to worry about is the softness of the plastic that was used here. Like the Sea Assault drone, the material is softer than the plastic used in most of the other figures. It’s heavy and solid, so serves well in the bulk of the figure, but the extremities like the gun barrels of the machine gun and grenade launcher on the forearms are a different story.

Due to the posing in package, they came out of the box deformed; bent and limp like a porn star without his wheaties. While this presents myriad amusing options when it comes to posing, it’s not really what I want.

Articulation is the same as the Sea Assault Drone. We get standard Hasbro balljoints (swivel/hinges) at his shoulders, elbows, and ankles. He’s got a balljointed neck and torso as well, and double hinge joints at the knee. His hips are double swivels with a hinge in the middle hinges; basically what we’re familiar with from our Marvel Legends (ML) days. There’s no wrist swivel, which would have been welcome.

I’m not sure why Hasbro continues to use these swivel/hinge joints on it’s figures elbows and knees. Well, that’s not entirely true. I can understand why they want to keep using it (cuts down on parts they need to run off), but I can’t understand why they can’t see that the figure loses a big chunk of poseability when they do this.

For one, the dual joint limits the range of motion of the elbow. Usually, a well-designed hinge can go a full 45 degrees and a double can allow the arm to almost fold up towards itself just like a real arm. The Hasbro elbow is usually blocked by the bicep, so you’re lucky to get 25 degrees out of it.

The swivel part of the joint is meant to replace the bicep (or thigh) swivel. It does it fairly well, but at the expense of proper looking anatomy. Hold your own arm out in front and bend it at the elbow, turn it toward your other arm. Your bicep muscle follows as you move your forearm across you chest. On a figure equipped with a Hasbro elbow, the bicep remains facing upward.

Kids are dumb enough already. Teaching them erroneous biology isn’t helping.

But enough ranting about tangential topics. The Ground Assault Drone is a pretty solid figure, once you fix the limp weapons (boil and freeze should do the trick here). Like the Sea Assault Drone, it’s place in your display should be to surround Iron Man and War Machine and stand there looking mean.

It doesn’t really matter if they can’t really do much else.

I won’t go too far into the Mark VI included in the pack. Like the Mark V in the Armored Assault box set, the new figure is exactly the same as the Mark VI that was included in the main, single pack releases. The only difference really, is paint.

The new figure is more movie accurate interms of paint, compared to the first release. You can see from the pictures that compared to the original 4″ Mark VI, the new figure is far more detailed. The original Mark VI had only a gold paint layer over the tacky red paint. This one has much cleaner applications, with silver highlights. The changes feel much more significant compared to the Armored Assault Mark V.

However, if you already bought the Walmart Hall of Armore version, your out of luck. This is exactly the same figure, minus the cool display.

Ah, Hasbro, you sneaky bastard.

The last figure in this set is probably the biggest draw. Even if he’s not the real reason I bought the Fury of Combat set (despite everything I pointed out above, I really like the drones), you can tell by the For Sale threads on the toy forums that most people are keeping their Sammy Jacksons and getting rid of the rest.

I can’t blame them. This is one hell of a figure.

First things first. This is NOT a completely original figure. The torso is quite obviously a re-use of the GI Joe Beachhead figure, which is recognizable by the body hugging sweater he’s wearing. I’m not entirely sure which Joe the legs came from, but I’m pretty sure they are not original since they are so generic that Hasbro would be pretty silly if they didn’t reuse something. They’re just legs in pants with army boots.

He comes with a few accessories. The trench coat is the big one of course. While there are a lot of collectors that love the real cloth costumes on figures, I’m not one of them. Especially at this scale. It is just too small to allow the fabric to really fold as it would in real life. What you’re left with is a squarish looking coat that makes him look like he’s wearing 6 inches of padding under it.

It helps if you remove the included shoulder holster and put it OVER the trench coat. The loops hold the shoulders of the garment down so it looks a tad more natural. It doesn’t do anything about the flaps in front, the unnatural draping, or the fact that he has a perpetually popped collar though.

Sadly, you can’t remove the gun that’s in the holster. Ridiculous.

He can use other weapons from your 1/18th scale army though, which is good. The pistol he comes with is kind of dinky, considering he’s up against 2 robots who are easily a head taller than him and out mass him by a ton. You’d think they’d have given him a howitzer or something.

I’d rather just deck him out in other gear and remove the coat. It’s too campy for me. Also, I’ve experienced the type of cloth they used here, too. It’s this thin leatherette stuff. They used it on the old ML Gambit. The jacket of the one in my collection is flaking so badly that it’s mostly white now. Just a matter of time before this goes the same way.

It would have been nicer if they took the ML Logan route and made a rubber coat for him. It would solve the draping issues and make it last a little longer (not forever mind you, but my ML Logan’s jacket is in far better shape than Gambit’s).

The likeness is good, especially considering how small this guy is. You can immediately see Samuel L. Jackson there, staring back at you about to say, “… we’re going to find a way to get out of here. First, we’re going to seal off this.. CHOMP… nomnomnomnomnom…”

If you haven’t watched Deep Blue Sea, go find it now.

Unfortunately, like most GI Joe figures, he isn’t truly in scale with the MU line. The MU line has a superhero aesthetic that means they are actually bigger than 4″. That means that he’s a little on the short side. It’s fine if you put him next to the IM2 figures, but next to the Wrecking Crew, he’s a little shrimpy.

As 4″ figures go though, you can’t really fault it for that. The likeness is just something that amazes me and makes me hope that the Scarlett Johanssen Black Widow will be half as good.

This has been a long review so let’s recap.

The Good:

 

Good choice for a boxset assortment
Sculpt on all 3 figures is good
2 figures that you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise
Articulation is fair all around
Fair paint apps

 

The Bad

Price is a bit high (Php 2,300.00 Suggested Retail Price, I think)
Mark VI is too similar to the Hall of Armor version
All the figures are re-tools/re-colors to some extent
No stands, and too few accessories

 

I’d still recommend it, just because if the fun factor of Nick Fury, the nice paint job on the Mark VI, and the fact that the drones are included. However, it’s not really a must have.