Transformers Prime Beast Hunters Commander Class Shockwave Weapons Specialist Figure

My son had been desperately searching for this for months. He loves it now he has it, to add to his collection.

Made one 10 year old who constructed it himself very happy.

My 12 year old loves it.

Taking their cues from IDW, the creators of Transformers : Prime re-imagined Shockwave not as a calculating Military Operations warrior of great power and strategy, but the science guy whom crosses all sorts of moral and ethical boundaries in the pursuit of science. Were it a totally fresh take on the character, I might get into a bit more. As it is, it's another indictment of the sort of lazy `for the fans' hack job that Prime has delivered. Just what does a science guy need a massive cannon arm for anyway? The character was a physically impressive , if dispassionate and slightly lifeless addition to the Decepticon ranks in the Prime TV show, where he spent a load of time engineering a batch of Predacon clones, only for Megatron to pull the plug on the whole thing. Which was a wretched waste of the build up of the sub-plot that gave the third season the whole `Beast Hunters' title in the first place.The character has managed two toys. A large Voyager figure which hasn't shown up at all in Europe and this smaller Cyberverse Commander class toy. I bought one because beggars can't be choosers. The RRP is a joke though. Recession or not, there's no way this 4" toy is worth £9.99. Somewhere along the way, this seems to have become an acceptable price point for all action figures of this size. It's no wonder the shelves are choked with these things.Despite his inverse relationship with actual manufacturing cost and retail price, Shockwave is a blinder. He's an absolute corker of a figure and makes up in no small way for the lack of the larger toy in the way that Legion Breakdown utterly failed to do. His robot mode has a pleasing bulk and a more thoughtful colour palette than the larger toy, so those ridiculous feet don't look quite as daft as they otherwise would. He's this lovely sparkly lilac shot through with deeper swipes of purple neatly accented with blacks, silvers and greys. And then there's his lovely beady red eye.Articulation is decent, on a par with other figures of this size. The sweep of his legs does mean he's best posed as standing straight he looks uncomfortable. The only real problem with the robot mode is the slightly silly and compensatory gun arm. It's bloody huge and quite awkward. The underside is pretty hollow too, so leaving it resting at his side looks cack. The kinetic launcher is pretty good fun though and easier to work in robot mode than tank mode. If he had the requisite hose, he'd be pretty much perfect.For a small figure, Shockwave packs in a fairly complex transformation that belies a rather obvious looking alt mode. It's quite surprising to be greeted with such a fiddly transformation and so many small moving parts. Great fun if you're an adult, but probably destined to be broken by the target age group.The tank mode is the dull replacement for the iconic Ray Gun alt mode and a boring carryover from the Dark Of The Moon version of Shockwave. It's also one of the most crushingly predicatable choices Hasbro tend to give bad guys if they don't turn into a jet. Unlike the DOTM version of Shockers though, this is actually pretty decent, if not actually terribly convincing as anything, despite the tank treads. In the main this down to the alt mode being just a pile of artfully arranged robot limbs passing itself as an alt mode. Given the amount of moving parts in the transformation, it's one of those where there's a bit of a wobble to the thing as various parts don't clip properly where they should or sit flush next to each other. I hesitate to use the word over-engineered, because he really isn't, it's just that there's too much going on in this small scale to really be workable. The chest as windscreen isn't a favourite of mine either.I like Shockwave, he's impressive but there is just a little bit of a feeling of him ultimately being not that much better than the Cyberverse version of Megatron.

it is a logical choice. hours of fun with it.