Toy Review - Combiner Wars Ultra Magnus
Series - Combiner Wars
Size/class - Leader
Wave - 3
New/remould/redeco – New
Released here - June 2015
Approximate Retail Price - $100
Approximate Size - 22cm to top of head (antennae), 26cm to top of shoulder stacks
Allegiance - Autobot
Alt-mode - car carrier truck
Main Features/Gimmicks – Minimus Ambus, weapons can combine
Main Colours – Ultra Magnus = blue, white, red; Minimus Ambus = white, green
Main Accessories - x2 rifles, x2 dual missile launchers
Minimus Ambus
True to his name ("Minimus" means 'small' in Latin), Minimus Ambus stands at a dimunitive 5.3cm. Based on Alex Milne's design, Minimus has 6 points of articulation, with shoulders and hips on ball-socket joints, giving this little figure a reasonably good range of articulation. The transformation of the back/canopy part can be tricky because it's so small and hard to get a decent grip. There also doesn't appear to be any real mechanism to lock the shoulders into place, but at such a small size it's not as serious an issue as on larger toys, as there's less mass to drag the shoulders back as easily during play. The vehicle mode is a kind of "hover car" with no rolling wheels. It also has a Rodimus-esque spoiler on the back; not sure if that's some kind of in-joke (regarding Ultra Magnus' view towards Rodimus) or just a coincidence, I don't know.
Ultra Magnus
Based on Nick Roche's design, Ultra Magnus features 19 points of articulation, which for a figure of this toy's nature, is rather impressive. Minimus Ambus sits inside the truck cab which becomes the core of the robot body, with a sculpted 'cockpit' interior. The overall colour scheme is more influenced by G1 Ultra Magnus' cartoon colours, particularly with the use of white thighs. The TakaraTOMY version uses more G1 toy accurate (and also IDW comic accurate) red thighs. Ultra Magnus comes with two missile launchers and two rifles, each of which have 5mm posts and can be placed on the shoulders or in the hands. The hands have fingers which can open and close, but unfortunately they cannot seem to hold any of the weapons firmly. I would have personally preferred solid fists with 5mm holes (finger articulation is already something we got from the MP toy). The all of these weapons can combine to form a war hammer, which of course is a homage to Animated and TF Prime Ultra Magni. While the TakaraTOMY clearly has more paint ops, the paint apps on the Hasbro version are also reasonably well done - there's a nice use of silver on the face, chest, belly and knees, which helps to break up the blue, red and white. My only main gripes about it would be:
+ Hubcaps really should be painted silver.
+ The red used for the chest panel is a distinctly darker shade of red than that used on the plastic for the body/trailer. As such, they do clash.
Ultra Magnus does sport a neat looking Autobot insignia on the left side of his breastplate, in concordance with the Military Regalia Act.
The car carrier mode can hold up to four Commander Class or current Legends size figures. It can hold two Deluxes, but it's not really designed for this, and the Deluxes cannot freely roll in and out, and just look silly when packed in there.
Quality Assurance
My toy came without a wheel!
Hopefully this is a one off freak thing and nobody else has this problem.
Overall
While the missing wheel on mine is incredibly aggravating, it's more of a QA issue rather than a design flaw. As far as the design of this toy goes, I'm thoroughly impressed. We all know that this is a conceptually challenging toy as the toy incorporates the truck cab into the robot without being a detachable and transformable robot itself.
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Originally Posted by Raptormesh
He'd be able to hold the hammer easier if he could afford a two-handed grip, but that's not really a possibility given the inevitable bulk of the toy (very few Transformers can pull off a double handed sword grip, not even most (all?) MPs).
