Overall I would rate it as "Not very good." There really was a lot of awful rubbish in G2... the badly redecoed toys (with awful hurt-your-eyes day glo flouro coloured weapons and super long missiles), the incredibly bad cartoon, the fantastic comic that was axed too soon (gee, axe us!)... but most importantly, it failed to achieve its intended goal, which was to revitalise the Transformers brand. There were also some absolutely dreadful toy concepts too. The Autorollers were kinda blargh, and the Power Masters were just awful They make Firecons look good (though the G2 Firecons and Sparkabots were massive eyesores). My TF collecting massively slowed down during the G2 years. To this day I have a relatively small G2 collection (only 67 figures ). As Hursticon rightly said, it instead nearly killed it... and Transformers would have died if Beast Wars hadn't come along and saved it.

But there were some good things from G2. As I said, the comics are good (a real shame it didn't go beyond 12 issues), but arguably G2's greatest legacy lay with the later toys where they introduced the concept of the Transformers are articulated and poseable action figures in robot mode! The Dreadwing, Smokescreen, the Hero leaders, Laser Rods and Cyberjets suddenly gave us articulated robot modes! (something which Beast Wars would later refine and standardise) Another legacy would be the Go-Bots, which Car Robot/RiD revived as the SpyChangers. Transformers in scale with Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars with free-spinning axles that made them compatible with their playsets -- nice! But despite HasTak's best efforts, it was just too late... even some of the best G2 toys like Laser Optimus Prime continued to shelf warm for years. I remember seeing a mountain of Laser Optimus Primes shelfwarming at a Toys R Us as late as 1999 (I went and bought a second one to keep sealed (I later sold it off to a collector in Tokyo )). There just didn't seem to be enough interest in the line no matter what Hasbro tried with the toys... and their market research indicated that it was because kids weren't as interested in vehicles anymore, but animals were all the rage (Jurassic Park came out around the same time as G2). So Kenner released Beast Wars and Transformers enjoyed great success, lifting us out of the "Dark Ages" that was the G2 years!