So out of curiosity, does anyone have opinions on the more recent Transformers combiners? They've been doing updated versions of the Stunticons, Aerialbots and Combaticons, but I admit I've had mixed views. And I try not to judge too harshly when I don't have the actual toys to experiment with, as the Stunticons in particular suffered from very poor distribution in many areas and consequently became very expensive online. The Aerialbots are becoming common on shelves now and the Combaticons are kind of a work in progress, though only Vortex has currently been released.
I think for me, the fundamental problem is that they focus too much on trying to match the somewhat limited G1 animation models (which were typically simplified for ease of drawing, as well as often being inaccurate due to limited information on the toy designs). All three combiners use an interesting "skeleton" frame to which the limb bots attach, but I'm not really fond of this system. The "skeletal" versions look weird and goofy without any limbs attached, and I don't like the aesthetics of the arm bots being "broken" to give better articulation. You also can't swap arm and leg bots around, which has always been part of the fun of most combiners. I also hate that Silverbolt has a huge chunk of Superion's chest/upper body as a not very convincing base.
To be fair, there have been a number of modern figures that IMO do a great job of merging the toy functionality with the accuracy of the cartoon models in ways that weren't possible with the original toy molds. I have no issue when it's doable, but if I had to choose between having a good functional toy and a less fun one that looks good, I'd prefer the former personally. I'm also not fond of making the cartoon versions too accurate, in cases where that means replicating known problems with the animation models.
Menasor's original character model was unusually blocky and did weird things with the limb bots (they were depicted as being normal cars attached to limbs, rather than actually forming the limbs like in other combiner models). Superion's model, as a side effect of simplification, looks like he has generic planes and caused a lot of inconsistent coloring errors. Amusingly, one error that did occur consistently was that the Aerialbots would often merge into Superion in an order based on the gift set's instructions, but this would then change to the limb order from the gift set package art (which was different).
Bruticus has some strange oddities, some of which were presumably the result of not having good access to the original G1 toys for reference. The weirdest error was that his chest armor was consistently colored as though it was part of Blast Off, and in a few cases is even treated as though it's his wings as a separate component. The original toy does have a rather cool winged chest armor piece, but it's entirely different. Swindle's animation model has a randomly purple hood that doesn't match the rest of him, but might have been based on the toy having a purple chest in robot mode. Despite the two versions transforming very differently.
I don't know, I'm honestly kind of mixed. The hefty price point is another concern as Hasbro is already starting their 2026 price increase, which is frankly silly. A team leader like Silverbolt runs close to $100 by himself, and the other Aerialbots run about $30 each. That means a full team costs around $200 to complete, which is a significant amount even for adults of dubious maturity. Perhaps if anyone was brave enough to send me a set for Christmas, I could refne my opinions further.
projectswordtoys.blogspot.com
.png)
