Scavenger

So... this guy fights Thanos with the power of... trumpets? [No, you're thinking of the Ska-vengers. This is different. --ed.] click to embiggen Scavenger combines with his comrades to form Devastator. You may remember Scavenger as the gigantic wheel-bot who went tearing down the highway, flipping cars and smashing through signs until Optimus Prime shot him in the face. You'd be wrong: that was Demolishor, not Scavenger; the two just had identical appearances, but since one of them died before Devastator could be formed, everybody has to pretend like they're two different characters and not just bad movie-making. Scavmolisher's body is... not a body. There are arms, and a head, and then a hollow frame supporting two gigantic wheels. Nothing else. Weird, weird design. Since the toy is 45% arm, there's a lot of articulation to be found in those two appendages - various shoulders and biceps and elbows and so forth. Unfortunately, between the ratchets in a few of them, the generally stiff clearance, and the way the whole thing folds up to become a robot, this is less a toy than an experiment in how much rotational force can be applied in the wrong direction before a plastic joint will break. Unlike Rampage, who at least got a little base to help him stand, Scavenger gets nothing - he'll have to permanently rest his hands on the ground to help hold him up. They really couldn't have come up with anything to make him stable on his own? click to embiggen The way the altmode's flat treads fold out of the robot's round one is inventive, but surely they could have put some of that same thought into making the robot stand up? Or covering the top of the vehicle mode, so we couldn't see all the kibble inside? The altmode is either a Terex O&K RH400, a Bucyrus RH400, or a Caterpillar 6090 - the company ownership went through a couple change of hands, leading to the model being renamed. It's always been the same humongous mining excavator, anyway. The Studio Series figures are meant to be in scale with one another, but the Constructicons are definitely cheating things: the RH400 is about three stories tall, and there's no way even a Leader Class toy could deliver that. Like the Legends Class figure, Scavenger has a third mode - Devastator's shoulders, basically. At 13" wide, it really gives you a sense of how massive the assembled combiner is going to be. Scavenger proves that just because something has a very complex engineering in order to make all its modes work, that doesn't necessarily mean any of those modes are going to be all that good. Hasbro's designers definitely worked hard on this one, but Scavenger just isn't great. Rampage | Scrapmetal | Long Haul | Hightower | Mixmaster | Scavenger | Scrapper | Overload -- 01/28/20

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