I finally completed this set yesterday and am really happy with it. I'm all in for the G2 version, as that slowly dribbles out over the next few years.
My only two complaints are that the sword is tiny in combined mode, and that the guns of the limb bots don't really do anything. There's enough 5mm ports to plug them all in, but I guess I was expecting some kind of combined mega-gun or something.
I enjoy looking back on the last few years of combiners and seeing HasTak slowly iterating their designs.
To be fair, it's not the fairest comparison as CW and POTP stuff didn't have the benefit of the extra mass from Motormaster's trailer, and needed the limbs to do more than plug on. A big part of why I like this set is that in combined mode it feels very solid, but then that is in part down to every single one of the combined mode joints being set up specifically for that mode. A lot of why I didn't like the CW combiners that much was because a lot of the engineering that had to pull double duty (limb robot mode waists having to be combiner mode elbows, and the actual combiner port joints needed to be shoulders and knees) was a mess.
Those factors aside, this is massively helped by a few things from a design perspective.
1. Big, broad feet with solid ankle tilts. Compared to the first wave of Combiner Wars stuff (tiny feet with no tilts) and the later POTP stuff (still tiny, some ankle tilt), its night and day.
2. The chest and shoulders are set up to stop the arms from bowing inward at the shoulder.
3. I think the idea of having dedicated roles and engineering for each limb helps. I got absolutely nothing out of CW and POTP's "everyone can be either a leg or arm" play pattern, and the hand/foot/guns actively made me like the figures less. The parts having to pull triple duty made them worse. You get a tiny foot the size of a hand that has gun barrels for toes, you get a hand that has gun barrels hanging off the front that can't actually extend fingers, or you get a gun with a thumb. This set benefits from each figure having a set role.
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