Decepticon Soldier

Fodder for the cannons! Decepticon soldiers capture the Autobots and transport them to Kaon Prison. Decepticons have always had the advantage when it comes to nameless, faceless ranks. Okay, so the various Skittles-colored Seekers technically had names, but did they really? Or did they just take up room in crowd shots because that was easier to animate? There are always the various Reflector clones if Seekers are too individualized for you. Anyway, the Autobots eventually got the Autotroopers (bringing the tally of worthwhile things from Kiss Players up to "one"), but they only ever get toys as overpriced exclusives. The War for Cybertron games needed lots of disposable (read: "explodable") troopers running around, so both sides got reinforcements, but only the Deceptcon soldier has gotten a Studio Series Gamer Edition toy. It's a weird grey-green shade, with a face that's just an orange visor across the eyes and down the front. We've seen named characters with similar, but this still looks suitably generic. The Decepticon Soldier is one of those figures that's mis-transformed in the package, and needs to be fixed once you open him. But the instructions don't actually show you how he's supposed to be: their version of the "correct" legs has the wheels facing forward, pretty much in the same spot they'll be in his altmode; to really get them right, you need to flip the wheels over and swing them back, a subtle change but one that makes a difference. They're not actually from the game model - the wheels there end up in the back of the legs, not off to the sides - and they make the legs look too wide. The points of articulation are good, but the range isn't. There's a balljointed head, but it's so stiff as to be basically useless. There are shoulders, but the tires up there get in the way. The elbows, wrists, and waist are fine, but the armor on the hips limits how far you can move the hips, and the kibble on the back of his legs doesn't actually attach in any way, so it wants to start flopping around any time you try to move the knees. At least taking the right arm off is easy, to replace it with his Neutron Assault Rifle accessory. This is the War for Cybertron version of the gun, not the big double-barrelled version from Fall of Cybertron. If you keep the legs the way Hasbro suggests, they're already in position for converting him, so all you have to do is push them together and turn the waist around. Crack open the forearms so you can fold the hands inside, drop the shoulders down to the arms can plug into the robot's side, and fold the kibble from his back up over his head. That's really all it takes. The soldier's altmode is some type of Cybertronian car, of course. It retains the robot's coloration, and the gun can fit onto the roof for storage. There's a problem with the engineering, though: the car's roof doesn't fit in the way it's supposed to, sticking up in the front instead of lining up smoothly with the rest of the car's body as it should. It's a minor annoyance, but it's one of many present in both robot and vehicle modes. I can't even tell what part of things are getting in the way, to trim them down if need be. The Decepticon Soldier apparently uses the same engineering (though not the same parts) as Gamer Edition Barricade, which goes a long, long way to making me feel better about never seeing that figure in stores. Like, I no longer feel bad about that at all. This could have been a really fun toy, and it's neat to get an army-builder character in the line, but the work feels incomplete and could have been a lot better. -- 10/01/24 Who's your favorite "generic" Transformer type? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.