Cliffjumper

He's here to drive you down to Know Your Role Boulevard. The best place to find Cliffjumper is wherever there's likely to be a fight. The tough, aggressive robot loves nothing more than pounding Decepticons into scrap. Cliffjumper comes to us from the same four-pack as Tarn, bringing the desirable figures in that one up to a whopping "two." Which I suppose is better than these multipacks usually go, but it still would have been a lot better if we could have just gotten the pair of them by themselves. And it would have been even better than that if they'd written any kind of bio for the characters in the box so we didn't have to copy one from the old Cyberverse toy. Er, that's "Cyberverse" as in the "we renamed the Legends Class scale for no good reason" scale, not Cyberverse as in "the cartoon that gave us Rack'n'Ruin. And also the Tarn repaint mentioned previously." If Tarn had been the only figure in the four-pack I wanted, I'd never have bought it. But here was a Prime Cliffjumper, and more than that, he looked to be a new mold! Because I'm stupid! I legitimately did think this Cliffjumper was a unique sculpt, somehow managing to not recognize the body as belonging to Rescue Bots Chase. Because I hadn't really played with that one much when this began showing up. Now that I have, it's easy to spot, but it's impressive how well this blocky mold works as an update to two such different toys. Color me impressed! It's not all the same, though. There are a few differences that will matter once we get to the altmode, but right now we get the benefit of a new head. Of course we do, that's how these things work. It's definitely the Prime design, with the pointed chin, round cheeks, and the horns sticking out the top. I'm honestly a little surprised they didn't just reuse the Studio Series CJ head, since that's theoretically the same character, and it would have saved them at least one mold. According to Mark Maher's design notes, they at least considered making one of these horns removable, so you could re-create the look when it got broken off in a fight. Expectedly, Cliffjumper moves at the ankles, knees, thighs, hips, waist, elbows, biceps, shoulders, and head. There are hinges in the wrists that aren't used for converting him, but just move the hands to the inside so they aren't bumping up against the car-door kibble. The bars the arms are mounted on don't click into place in any way, counting on friction to keep them up; not the best choice, especially since even a little variance in production can make them droop loosely. On the Prime cartoon, Cliffy's hands turned into triple-barrelled blasters as his weapon of choice, something you can sort of duplicate here: he has the same accessories as Chase, and if you dismantle that claw thing and plug one of the "spotlights" into the top of it, it makes a decent stand-in. Unfortunately, if you want him to duel-wield, you'll need to buy a second box set, so good luck with that. As for all the extra pieces you'll be left with when you do that, eh, you're on your own. To convert Cliffjumper, raise the arms above the head, hinge the shins open and extend the legs, turn them to the back and press them together, tip the feet in and fold down the headlights, bend the robot in half at the waist, tuck the windshield under the hood, push the arms in to form the doors, and then use brute force to jam the little "wings" into place to finish the vehicle. Cliffjumper's altmode is a blocky muscle car, as it should be. It's fully red with black windows and silver hubcaps. Two minor parts of the toy have been remolded from when this was Chase: the roof, to remove the police lights; and the grille, because it's right beneath the hood and they were already adding the cow-horn hood ornament that's so synonymous with Prime Cliffjumper. The various weapons can plug into ports on the sides and rear of the car, but they don't look very unobtrusive when they do. They're molded from smoky translucent plastic, which could almost pass as filthy exhaust (not that one) if there were any way to plug them into the very back. Or the pipes that stick out in front of the rear tires. The level to which this mold works for both Chase and Cliffjumper is truly impressive. They both look like themselves, despite starting with wildly disparate styles. Plus, his existence keeps this four-pack from being the "one figure worth buying and and three chunks of dead weight" it otherwise could have been. -- 12/24/24