Universe Roadbuster Upgraded!
Today thanks to Jaydisc I received my Roadbuster Kit.
The kit is overall pretty good and certainly does the job of bringing out the character of Roadbuster into the Universe repaint which out of the box looked more like CD Hot Shot doing a Roadbuster cosplay
Although the material quality used for this kit is certainly bellow those we see with Fan Projects such as City Commander and also bellow Hasbro's contemporary manufacturing standards - It is infinitely better than that 'Why so serious?' City Commander upgrade and the sculpted pieces are nicely done even if the low cost materials do show some minor defects here and there but no more than the ones you find in a packaged mass produced toy and hardly noticeable.
Overall it was an easy 5 minute 'install' to get the upgrades on. The head is the trickiest bit but its still fairly easy even if a bit scary as you need to apply pressure to 'lock' the head together by pushing in the top of the helmet into a rectangular 'peg' (remaining part of the original head). The whole head stays together pretty solidly through this 'lock' design and you don't need to add the screw you removed from the original piece so you can just store it with the remaining pieces of Hotshot's helmet. Although the 'face' of the original head remains inside of the Roadbuster helmet, It's very difficult to see it though the visor as the clear plastic piece is fairly thick.
The pieces also don't need to be of tougher plastic as they are peripheral to the toy's engineering and more cosmetic in practice as they don't support any heavy moving pieces. The green color on the weapons is not a perfect match to the base toy's green but it is close enough not to be distracting and blends in pretty well with the rest of the toy. The designers have indeed succeeded in bringing out the character of Roadbuster into this repaint without having to re-engineer the base mold with the only difference being that you need to turn the head to the side before Transforming into alt mode due to the increase size.
The kit's only real flaw is in its main weapon, the recoil canon. The canon doesn't like to stay together and has a tendency to split in half a bit, it doesn't fall apart but it does often split open. I will probably end up gluing the halves together but before I do that I wish to insert a spring in there as the recoil gimmick doesn't have any feedback.
Overall I am impressed with this kit and I am glad I bought it as the character of Roadbuster is now unmistakable in this toy as seen in the gallery bellow:
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