Toy Review: Beast Hunters DLX Skystalker

[Omega Metro]

Well I like it. That's all that matters really in my opinion.

[Tetsuwan Convoy]

I was interested in the Beast Mode. How does that fare? Good wing movement and stuff or what?

Robot mode looks a bit bleh and not all that fond of the colours

[griffin]

The wings rotate at the arms, and have a hinge halfway through the wing, so can have a variety of "settings".
The big white discs spoil it though, with or without them attached.

[GoktimusPrime]

IMHO this toy isn't nearly as bad as I'd expected. I was expecting to really hate this toy, but I don't. I find the transformation to be quite intuitive and there were some pleasant features in the design. The yellows look a bit odd, but used sparingly enough that it doesn't look bad. I find the overall colour scheme works well, particularly with the airbrushing on the wings; a nice touch. Yes, it is fundamentally another "stand up quadruped," but there are enough neat features in the engineering that work in making this a reasonably decent toy.

The hand transformation is... weird. They seem to have revisited that part of Injector's transformation where the beast head regurgitates a robot face, but I think that it's a lot better executed here because the robot head actually transforms into the upper palate of the mouth, so you can still open the beast's mouth in beast mode without exposing the robot head. But I can see how this wouldn't be everyone's cup of Energon, so I think this is one part of the design that people are either gonna love or hate.

The disc launching gimmick on the wings is simply but effective, and I don't think it detracts from the toy too badly. It does make the toy somewhat top heavy, but the figure stands surprisingly well in robot mode considering. The only weird thing I find is the robot's melee weapon, which is the creature mode's tail tip that you detach and place on the hand. Kinda like a spiked boxing glove... on one hand. (o_O) But I do like how the robot mode has both melee and ranged offensive capabilities.

Overall I think this is a pretty nice toy. Is it worth full RRP? Maybe... but if you can find it at below RRP I'd definitely recommend it.

[liegeprime]

oooh can't wait to pick one up! It will complete my big figure Beasts quite nicely, Im not interested in the robot mode for these figures anyways as most of them look like an after thought really.

[GoktimusPrime]

Actually I find the robot mode on this toy to be better than the creature mode. The main draw back with the creature mode is the hips which are theoretically meant to attach/clip to other side of the tail - you can see the tabs and stuff - but in execution it just doesn't work and instead the halves of the hips just sit loosely on either side. The tail sits in between which does serve to stop the hip halves from closing in on each other, so it's not as bad as say the shoulders on Deluxe Movie Brawl or Masterpiece Lambor. I can see how this design feature would've looked good on the drawing board, but somewhere along the line it just failed to adequately translate into the final product.
P.S.: Posted pics here