Name: Reinhardt Wilhelm
Age: 61
Occupation: Adventurer
Affiliation: Overwatch (formerly)
Reinhardt Wilhelm (and quick side note: doesn't that sound like they've listed his name backwards? Like, Wilhelm is a first name, and Reinhardt is a last name, but this character does them the other way around. It's weird.) was one of the founding members of Overwatch, but was forced to retire when he got too old. When things got bad, though, he was ready
to be a hero again.
Prior to Overwatch, Reinhardt was a member of the Crusaders. No, not some second-tier college mascot, a group of people who dress like full-on medieval knights despite being a unit within the modern German Armed Forces. There was a 2019 SDCC exclusive showing him unmasked, but this standard version is wearing his "Lego Sauron"-lookin' helmet. Why didn't the toy just come with both heads? It couldn't have added much to the already inflated cost.
Overwatch is a Blizzard game. Blizzard also makes Starcraft. So it makes sense that Reinhardt's Overwatch armor
would look like a semi-medievalized version of the Starcraft Space Marine Powered Combat Suit. It's only "semi" because the armor he wears as a member of Overwatch may have the same basic shapes as his Crusader armor, but it's got a more modern design: smoother curves, fewer baroque embellishments, etc. It's like a halfway step between an actual dark ages knight, and the powered armor of the future Space Marines.
For whatever reason, Hasbro made their Overwatch Ultimates smaller than every other 6"-scale line there is. Reinhardt, for his part, gets to avoid the worst of this problem by virtue of being humongous. The toy is 8¼" tall, which isn't as large as he would be if these toys had been sized properly, but does make him tower over plenty of characters we could name. You do have to wonder how a normal, human-sized human could fit into armor this big - is he wearing it, or piloting it? Do his legs dangle? How does his arm even reach down to the gloves?
The articulation remains good. Kebab has a balljointed head and neck, swivel/hinge shoulders, swivel biceps, hinged elbows, swivel/hinge wrists, a balljointed chest, balljointed hips, swivel thighs, double-hinged knees, and swivel/hinged ankles. His massive shoulder pads are also hinged separately from the arms, and there's a hinge for the loincloth. Metal loincloth. The loinmetal. He can't get into a lot of very dynamic poses, because of his bulk, but most of the joints are stiff enough to hold their position (if you extend them too far, the weight can become to much for them).
Reinhardt only uses one weapon in the game, so it would be stupid if Hasbro didn't include it. He has no real ranged attacks, just a long melee thanks to his rocket-powered hammer. The hammer is taller than
the figure, even with his pointy helmet, but getting the dang thing into his hands is a chore and a half! His role on the team is defense, so you can remove the lion-head crest from his left arm and replace it with a 13" by 8" translucent plastic shield. The SDCC exclusive also came with a blast effect to show the hammer hitting the ground, but all this one gets are two little black discs to help the shield stand. What, no flame jets for the hammer?
Rather than being sold in the same packaging as the solo figures or two-packs, Reinhardt was available in a truly giant box - the same that probably would have been used for D.Va, Roadhog, Bastion, and all the other oversized characters, if this line hadn't tanked as hard as a successful Reinhardt player is supposed to. He is still a decent figure, and if you wanted to imagine him as some kind of specialized Doombot, it'd work.
-- 09/26/20
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