TF:Prime Figure Review Thread
Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 8:16 pm
I guess it's my turn to start one of these threads, with...
Transformers: Prime - Robots In Disguise - Deluxe Class - (Revealer) - Series 1 - Autobot - Wheeljack - Level 2 - Intermediate. WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THIS LINE?!? How many things can you say about a friggin' deluxe figure?!? The deluxes are known internally as "Revealers" as it shows on the TRU and Target pegs, and the rest of that stuff is actually on the packaging, it's like the brand manager is getting paid by the letter. Also of interest, the difficulty ratings are now "1, 2, 3" - no more 4, yet the instructions on ol' Wheeljack here are pretty hefty, so it's like what's the point of putting that on the packaging when you're not going to give the customer the advice you're promising them?
Anyway, Wheeljack was $15 at TRU, and is VERY small in package in vehicle mode, even with his swords showing in the tray. Packaging is more white and red, smart because those colors catch the eye very nicely unlike the darker blues of the DOTM line. The card is a simple die-cut shape, the most complex being a different take on the J-hook; the blister is shaped to match and has simple angled shapes embossed out the top and front - pretty standard fare for TF lately. The Autobot logo is fading out from white into red and is being attacked by lightning, it doesn't quite pop, but it also doesn't take away from the character portrait to its right, which is BLASTING YOU IN THE FACE BUYER LOOK AT ME NOW! The blister has a bunch of different text boxes yet keeps itself from fighting for attention; oddly, the Hasbro logo makes a more prominent space than usual. There's tech-spec numbers above a different character portrait to the side of the blister, I don't love the graphs they used, the angled ends look weird. The numbers for this WJ remind me that he's not a character I know, I haven't seen Prime episodes with him as I've not been watching the show after the first few episodes, but his numbers are far off from the classic Wheeljack numbers I'm more used to (and it's odd, I'm not at all a techspec guy, yet that stood out for me immediately in the store). Bottom houses the barcode and very small co-sells for his case-mates. The cardback art is a little sparse for my tastes, images of the figure in both modes along with the shadow-accenting Hasbro photoshops onto every figure's official photos, and here WJ's eyes are light-piped to an incredible degree - the real figure would need a spotlight to get that bright. There's a simple bio, but it doesn't have a box to stand out. Beneath the toy shots is an ad for the show with the main heroes to the right. The card front is alright for a line look, but I don't like the card back much, it's only good thing is showing the toy, and knowing Hasbro photography like I do, I know that'll be a detriment at some point.
For this figure, the card's character art presents a problem. It uses the series character design from a promo shot, but the shot is of WJ's forearm sporting a big-honkin' blaster as it is about to fire a blue blast - it's striking and takes up as much attention as the rest of the character art, but the toy has no such feature whatsoever! I wanted to emulate that gun either as an accessory or as an internal feature, and the figure just doesn't have it, it's odd since the forearm could easily have put something like that gun barrel on the forearm's pre-transformed rotation, yet didn't. The art also shows an Autobot faction logo on his chest, it's small but prominent, and the toy has space for it but no actual logo, which is a shame. I looked up a little info on the TF:P character and found out he sports a grenade on his left hip, sure enough that's showing in the promo art on the card as well, but again this is entirely omitted from the toy. The toy is a fine toy on its own, but it's emulating a character and these aren't huge touches, if your primary card art is showing it, your toy designs should be as well. I guess we're lucky they showed the mouthplate on instead of off, as most promo art showed, since the toy has the mouthplate.
Ok, so let's get down to the toy on its own.
Wheeljack comes in alt mode, it's a very compact little sports car, on its own it looks fine but it has a very small footprint for its deluxe pricepoint, slightly smaller than DOTM Sideswipe; but WJ's alt mode is a taller design thankfully. The car is a modernization of the Lancia Stratos that G1 Wheeljack was based on, though G1 WJ was based on the Stratos Turbo racing car, and Prime WJ is definitely closer to the Stratos Stradale. The Stratos is a VERY small car which is why it has such a big windshield in proportion to the rest, it's tiny in real life, so Wheeljack holds up well to that. This alt mode has bold fenders (oddly the tops of the fenders are separate pieces, suggesting they'll be swapped out on a later revisit), sharper angles, pronounced side mirrors, the classic rear-window louver panels (entirely closed), a small mid-engine-area spoiler, pronounced rear hips, and an even blunder rear end than the real car - in fact, if not for the tail light section of the fenders, the car would end at the wheels (the wheels are low-pro, big, with swept blades inside). The car has a low ground clearance but not stupidly so, and is solid with all 4 wheels free-rolling on the ground. The only thing I don't really like about the sculpt of the car is the open area at the rear end from the midline down - it's passable, but no axle showing means it's unacceptable IMO; the front end underside has an open slot at the ground on either side, but this is somewhat obscured by the forward slant of the upper portion of the front end - it bothers me, but isn't the same kind of deal-breaker because the middle of the car still has body. Oddly, while the headlights get a specific sculpt, the side mirrors get their own pop-out detailed aspects, there's sculpted panels on the air inlets behind the side windows, and even the gutters where the windshield wipers would take in rain swept from the glass, there's no sculpt for the doors, so the sides have a big expanse of less detail, although the car gets an overall shape that keeps it from being just a flat panel. The car is shot in bald white plastic, painted at the nose and roof with an angled version of the Air Alitalia red, green, and white styling found on G1 Wheeljack, along with some red angled shapes on the sides that don't really feel as important but are welcome to break up the low-sculpted area; a big dark blue translucent wrap-around angled windshield; dark gray louvers in place of the back window; silver for the wheels over black plastic for the tires; and the large tail-lights are painted red and yellow over very dark plastic (possibly translucent blue of the windshield). The white holds up well, consistent across different areas except the small white paint on the middle of the roof, but other than that hiccup it gets away with being a white plastic car better than most. The vehicle mode exterior features a 5mm hole on either rear fender just behind the middle of the wheels. The windshield is in 2 halves that meet in the middle, theat is the only real panel line that is an issue here IMO, the rest holds up nicely. The underside of the car features an obvious robot pelvis and upper legs, the rest shows no sign of being what it is, and there's some sculpted detail on the inside of the front end of the car. So, good homage to G1 Wheeljack but a slimmer, more updated design, and it looks good pretty much overall in paint and in sculpt, except for a gap in the back end.
Alt Mode: 9 / 10
Accessories, WJ's swords are all we get, let's talk about them separately for alt mode. The twin swords are dark gray hilts with silver-painted blades, no red hilts or black middles to the blades. The blade design is persian with it growing thicker at the middle then thinning back at the handle, it has small glyphs sculpted on either side of the blade just above the hilt. The hilts are 5mm squared-off pegs with a notch cut through the middle of the tang, hollow hilt head on either side, thinner angled pommel flag-type design (on the show is the hilt as it's one continuous single bar leading up to the blade), and off the side of the hilt head is a stubby 5mm peg. Overall, the swords are fine, though not entirely what you see in the show apparently. In vehicle mode, the swords can be pegged onto the rear fenders which looks not so bad, the swords follow the lines of the rear fenders until they get clear and then curve in towards the doors; other 5mm accessories of course can also be plugged into those fenders, with about as much success as they usually have. The swords are intended to be big tusks though and the cut-outs in the hilts correspond to tabs inside the front fenders where the bumper would otherwise be, the tusks look is intended but it doesn't do it for me, it's not terrible but it just doesn't blow my mind either. The swords can also be entirely hidden by tabbing flat into the underside, they add a few millimeters to the underside yet still clear the ground, and still do not show in normal vehicle mode, even with one of my swords very slightly bent.
Transformation in the instructions has 17 steps, although the last one is a 5-parter. The first step to bot mode is the roughest one, it's not immediately clear what parts come out with the doors and why they aren't initially moving even when you're doing it right. From there though it's a fun and unique transformation, although some of the steps are a bit killjoy the way the instructions present them, but once you get the flow it's all quite nifty. The instructions do a poor job showing the shoulders tabbing into the chest, they move the shoulder parts around too much so it's easy to get that element lost thanks to Hasbro. The way the front fenders slide up and then rotate 90 degrees is probably my favorite part, it's just Transformers fun. Going from bot to alt mode is pretty much the same, not quite as fun since it's more obvious where things have to be, but that's a pretty common issue with TFs in general; there is the question of how the hands are supposed to be angled, they put tabs and a cut-out to guide them but it was easy to miss on my first pass. That said, it's not a "ooh brilliant perfect" transformation just because it's a small deluxe figure, so it's good, it's got new stuff, but it's not the end-all-be-all either.
Transformation: 7 / 10
Wheeljack is definitely related to his namesake, no fan could miss that with the head sculpt, colors, and roof chest - they all scream "Wheeljack". But the head also makes clear that this is part of a different universe, it's angled and angry and quite different in proportions, and the rest of the figure follows that. I have to confess that I don't terribly care for the Prime aesthetic, there have been a few designs that have caught my attention at the preview slideshows, but the overall Prime school of design leaves me cold... now, that out of the way, back to the figure. Wheeljack stands about as tall as the recent Generations Wheeljack who is a big of a short guy, but where that figure has tons of bulk, this TF:P figure is much more svelte and has almost no kibble at all. Wheeljack's sculpt is not terribly detailed, he has a few shapes at his shoulders and waist which are new, a little at his collar, and his chest successfully shrinks down the concept of his windshield, but largely he's enjoying details from his vehicle mode - it's not bad at all except for the arms which leave me cold in detail as well as overall shape. His head is an effective sculpt but simple rather than detailed, the lines are swept in more of an anime style, and thankfully as I mentioned he's got that mouthplate sculpted in rather than the weird little mouth some promo art shows; his eyes are light-piped blue, it doesn't pipe all that well without a flashlight, but they did sculpt the inner iris-circle. The arms are past his knees and bigger at the forearms than the upper arms, and they also sport significant windshield kibble inside at the midpoint, it's definitely not attractive left straight like that; but luckily they look much better bent all the way at the elbow, brought up to a more reasonable height. If one were a fan of the show design, they'd be confused by these arms, they don't deliver at all what the show art does, there's a pretense at the forearms but it's quite half-assed, and then there's door kibble on the outside and windshield kibble, and the shoulders stick out -- but I'm not terribly bothered since I'm not heavily invested in that character, so it's only the length and window kibble for me. The hands are big open hands, not gigantic but the big like someone who works with his hands for a living, they're open-C shaped with the thumb doing a lot of the work, and they have a natural sculpt to that pose despite being a clean 5mm circular opening. The figure's wings end up as an odd thing, they are 45-degree splits from the roof middle halves, they're not really what the doctor ordered and yet they're working for me as suggestive of the concept while unique. The legs look good, the lower legs mix the concept of the front end as legs with the boots concept we've seen more recently, and since he gets separate feet from the front end, it pays off overall. The deco adds a more gray and black to the mix which mixes it up nicely, but oddly there's no Autobot logo on this figure anywhere, especially not the little white spot at the middle of his chest that the character art consistently shows.
Articulation is pretty good for a smaller deluxe figure, there's a ball-jointed neck that can turn and look up quite a ways; restricted ball-jointed shoulders on hinges that can shrug up a few degrees, plus barrel receivers in the shoulders that let the shoulders rotate on the vertical axis; a hinge at the biceps; a hinge at the elbows; restricted ball-jointed wrists that lead into vertical axis-hinged hands; restricted ball-jointed hips that allow side-kicking, attached to rotation joints at the top of the thighs; hinged knees; and ball-jointed feet where the joint is sideways out the outside, but it works and looks better than any previous attempt I can think of. The jointing allows for some expressive poses, and the feet are just the right size and jointing to keep it upright in action poses, although they might be too narrow for 1-footed poses (I have mine in one now, but it has enough wobble that it won't stay that way over a few hours without help). The elbows and knees don't have as much range of motion as I'd like, they're more like 75 degrees instead of 90 or even 110 that I'd prefer, but his elements would block the lower legs anyway; the upper arms have the bicep hinges to somewhat compensate for their range issues. I would have liked to have seen a bicep rotation joint instead of that oddball barrel receiver rotation joint they use, I find that lack of bicep rotation the single most noticed joint missing whenever I hit the wall in a pose with Wheeljack, the lack of waist joint doesn't factor anywhere near as close. The joints are all tight and solid; the figure's stability is pretty good overall. The shins do rotate out of position a little when handled, and posing the figure usually folds the knee points flat; the right "wing" seems to de-transform on its own quite a bit on mine, but it looks like a "your mileage will vary" situation.
Robot Mode: 8 / 10 (or 7/10 if you are a stickler about show-accuracy)
So, getting back to the accessories now for robot mode to complete that conversation... The swords fit in the hands quite well and hold, the figure clearly is designed to wield these twin curved swords, his arm articulation and even neck tilting up just open the figure to a myriad of sword poses. The swords are long, as apparently they were on the show, although clearly thicker to A) not break, and B) fit in the hands, but the long arms do work with the swords' length. The only thing about posing I could say is an issue is - and it's a small thing - that the door kibble on the arms extends out past the wrists and the sword hilts have those plastic pommel/facade hilt-ends and the sideways 5mm pegs which all get in the way during rotation from about 5 degrees to 60 degrees, but from there out the figure can hold the swords out to the side just fine as long as you remove them before rotating the hand into another position. The swords can be pegged into the shoulders thanks to the 5mm holes from the rear fenders ending up there, but even better, the swords fit into cut-aways behind his shoulders - it's not mentioned in the instructions, but just outside of the wings and inside the shoulders in the back is a pair of square cut-outs to stow the blades, roughly where they were stowed on the show, although the hilts stick way up here due to the nature of, you know, "reality". So the swords are cool, he looks good wielding them, they stow away, yay; but why the hell does a figure with a firepower of 8 and a GIANT gun-hand showing on the packaging have... no gun at all? I don't get that, he already doesn't get his shoulder launcher. I gave him DOTM Sideswipe's big gun, it looks a hell of a lot better in Wheeljack's bigger arms, plus it has that sword gimmick so it still plays well here - WJ is keeping that damned gun! (No accessory for you Sideswipe, sorry, maybe if you hadn't been gray instead of silver, ya loser.) The swords are cool, not entirely color-accurate, but decent enough; they're just not all this figure should have, there's the big gun situation, and there's the grenade on the hip.
Accessories: 7 / 10
Overall, I like this Wheeljack figure in both modes, I like the transformation, the deco is ok but could be better, it's a bit small for the price, and while decently-articulated, it could use more articulation and range of motion. There's a lot of personality here and a lot of style without being painfully stylized.
Overall Score: 8 / 10 - Pretty Good
Transformers: Prime - Robots In Disguise - Deluxe Class - (Revealer) - Series 1 - Autobot - Wheeljack - Level 2 - Intermediate. WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THIS LINE?!? How many things can you say about a friggin' deluxe figure?!? The deluxes are known internally as "Revealers" as it shows on the TRU and Target pegs, and the rest of that stuff is actually on the packaging, it's like the brand manager is getting paid by the letter. Also of interest, the difficulty ratings are now "1, 2, 3" - no more 4, yet the instructions on ol' Wheeljack here are pretty hefty, so it's like what's the point of putting that on the packaging when you're not going to give the customer the advice you're promising them?
Anyway, Wheeljack was $15 at TRU, and is VERY small in package in vehicle mode, even with his swords showing in the tray. Packaging is more white and red, smart because those colors catch the eye very nicely unlike the darker blues of the DOTM line. The card is a simple die-cut shape, the most complex being a different take on the J-hook; the blister is shaped to match and has simple angled shapes embossed out the top and front - pretty standard fare for TF lately. The Autobot logo is fading out from white into red and is being attacked by lightning, it doesn't quite pop, but it also doesn't take away from the character portrait to its right, which is BLASTING YOU IN THE FACE BUYER LOOK AT ME NOW! The blister has a bunch of different text boxes yet keeps itself from fighting for attention; oddly, the Hasbro logo makes a more prominent space than usual. There's tech-spec numbers above a different character portrait to the side of the blister, I don't love the graphs they used, the angled ends look weird. The numbers for this WJ remind me that he's not a character I know, I haven't seen Prime episodes with him as I've not been watching the show after the first few episodes, but his numbers are far off from the classic Wheeljack numbers I'm more used to (and it's odd, I'm not at all a techspec guy, yet that stood out for me immediately in the store). Bottom houses the barcode and very small co-sells for his case-mates. The cardback art is a little sparse for my tastes, images of the figure in both modes along with the shadow-accenting Hasbro photoshops onto every figure's official photos, and here WJ's eyes are light-piped to an incredible degree - the real figure would need a spotlight to get that bright. There's a simple bio, but it doesn't have a box to stand out. Beneath the toy shots is an ad for the show with the main heroes to the right. The card front is alright for a line look, but I don't like the card back much, it's only good thing is showing the toy, and knowing Hasbro photography like I do, I know that'll be a detriment at some point.
For this figure, the card's character art presents a problem. It uses the series character design from a promo shot, but the shot is of WJ's forearm sporting a big-honkin' blaster as it is about to fire a blue blast - it's striking and takes up as much attention as the rest of the character art, but the toy has no such feature whatsoever! I wanted to emulate that gun either as an accessory or as an internal feature, and the figure just doesn't have it, it's odd since the forearm could easily have put something like that gun barrel on the forearm's pre-transformed rotation, yet didn't. The art also shows an Autobot faction logo on his chest, it's small but prominent, and the toy has space for it but no actual logo, which is a shame. I looked up a little info on the TF:P character and found out he sports a grenade on his left hip, sure enough that's showing in the promo art on the card as well, but again this is entirely omitted from the toy. The toy is a fine toy on its own, but it's emulating a character and these aren't huge touches, if your primary card art is showing it, your toy designs should be as well. I guess we're lucky they showed the mouthplate on instead of off, as most promo art showed, since the toy has the mouthplate.
Ok, so let's get down to the toy on its own.
Wheeljack comes in alt mode, it's a very compact little sports car, on its own it looks fine but it has a very small footprint for its deluxe pricepoint, slightly smaller than DOTM Sideswipe; but WJ's alt mode is a taller design thankfully. The car is a modernization of the Lancia Stratos that G1 Wheeljack was based on, though G1 WJ was based on the Stratos Turbo racing car, and Prime WJ is definitely closer to the Stratos Stradale. The Stratos is a VERY small car which is why it has such a big windshield in proportion to the rest, it's tiny in real life, so Wheeljack holds up well to that. This alt mode has bold fenders (oddly the tops of the fenders are separate pieces, suggesting they'll be swapped out on a later revisit), sharper angles, pronounced side mirrors, the classic rear-window louver panels (entirely closed), a small mid-engine-area spoiler, pronounced rear hips, and an even blunder rear end than the real car - in fact, if not for the tail light section of the fenders, the car would end at the wheels (the wheels are low-pro, big, with swept blades inside). The car has a low ground clearance but not stupidly so, and is solid with all 4 wheels free-rolling on the ground. The only thing I don't really like about the sculpt of the car is the open area at the rear end from the midline down - it's passable, but no axle showing means it's unacceptable IMO; the front end underside has an open slot at the ground on either side, but this is somewhat obscured by the forward slant of the upper portion of the front end - it bothers me, but isn't the same kind of deal-breaker because the middle of the car still has body. Oddly, while the headlights get a specific sculpt, the side mirrors get their own pop-out detailed aspects, there's sculpted panels on the air inlets behind the side windows, and even the gutters where the windshield wipers would take in rain swept from the glass, there's no sculpt for the doors, so the sides have a big expanse of less detail, although the car gets an overall shape that keeps it from being just a flat panel. The car is shot in bald white plastic, painted at the nose and roof with an angled version of the Air Alitalia red, green, and white styling found on G1 Wheeljack, along with some red angled shapes on the sides that don't really feel as important but are welcome to break up the low-sculpted area; a big dark blue translucent wrap-around angled windshield; dark gray louvers in place of the back window; silver for the wheels over black plastic for the tires; and the large tail-lights are painted red and yellow over very dark plastic (possibly translucent blue of the windshield). The white holds up well, consistent across different areas except the small white paint on the middle of the roof, but other than that hiccup it gets away with being a white plastic car better than most. The vehicle mode exterior features a 5mm hole on either rear fender just behind the middle of the wheels. The windshield is in 2 halves that meet in the middle, theat is the only real panel line that is an issue here IMO, the rest holds up nicely. The underside of the car features an obvious robot pelvis and upper legs, the rest shows no sign of being what it is, and there's some sculpted detail on the inside of the front end of the car. So, good homage to G1 Wheeljack but a slimmer, more updated design, and it looks good pretty much overall in paint and in sculpt, except for a gap in the back end.
Alt Mode: 9 / 10
Accessories, WJ's swords are all we get, let's talk about them separately for alt mode. The twin swords are dark gray hilts with silver-painted blades, no red hilts or black middles to the blades. The blade design is persian with it growing thicker at the middle then thinning back at the handle, it has small glyphs sculpted on either side of the blade just above the hilt. The hilts are 5mm squared-off pegs with a notch cut through the middle of the tang, hollow hilt head on either side, thinner angled pommel flag-type design (on the show is the hilt as it's one continuous single bar leading up to the blade), and off the side of the hilt head is a stubby 5mm peg. Overall, the swords are fine, though not entirely what you see in the show apparently. In vehicle mode, the swords can be pegged onto the rear fenders which looks not so bad, the swords follow the lines of the rear fenders until they get clear and then curve in towards the doors; other 5mm accessories of course can also be plugged into those fenders, with about as much success as they usually have. The swords are intended to be big tusks though and the cut-outs in the hilts correspond to tabs inside the front fenders where the bumper would otherwise be, the tusks look is intended but it doesn't do it for me, it's not terrible but it just doesn't blow my mind either. The swords can also be entirely hidden by tabbing flat into the underside, they add a few millimeters to the underside yet still clear the ground, and still do not show in normal vehicle mode, even with one of my swords very slightly bent.
Transformation in the instructions has 17 steps, although the last one is a 5-parter. The first step to bot mode is the roughest one, it's not immediately clear what parts come out with the doors and why they aren't initially moving even when you're doing it right. From there though it's a fun and unique transformation, although some of the steps are a bit killjoy the way the instructions present them, but once you get the flow it's all quite nifty. The instructions do a poor job showing the shoulders tabbing into the chest, they move the shoulder parts around too much so it's easy to get that element lost thanks to Hasbro. The way the front fenders slide up and then rotate 90 degrees is probably my favorite part, it's just Transformers fun. Going from bot to alt mode is pretty much the same, not quite as fun since it's more obvious where things have to be, but that's a pretty common issue with TFs in general; there is the question of how the hands are supposed to be angled, they put tabs and a cut-out to guide them but it was easy to miss on my first pass. That said, it's not a "ooh brilliant perfect" transformation just because it's a small deluxe figure, so it's good, it's got new stuff, but it's not the end-all-be-all either.
Transformation: 7 / 10
Wheeljack is definitely related to his namesake, no fan could miss that with the head sculpt, colors, and roof chest - they all scream "Wheeljack". But the head also makes clear that this is part of a different universe, it's angled and angry and quite different in proportions, and the rest of the figure follows that. I have to confess that I don't terribly care for the Prime aesthetic, there have been a few designs that have caught my attention at the preview slideshows, but the overall Prime school of design leaves me cold... now, that out of the way, back to the figure. Wheeljack stands about as tall as the recent Generations Wheeljack who is a big of a short guy, but where that figure has tons of bulk, this TF:P figure is much more svelte and has almost no kibble at all. Wheeljack's sculpt is not terribly detailed, he has a few shapes at his shoulders and waist which are new, a little at his collar, and his chest successfully shrinks down the concept of his windshield, but largely he's enjoying details from his vehicle mode - it's not bad at all except for the arms which leave me cold in detail as well as overall shape. His head is an effective sculpt but simple rather than detailed, the lines are swept in more of an anime style, and thankfully as I mentioned he's got that mouthplate sculpted in rather than the weird little mouth some promo art shows; his eyes are light-piped blue, it doesn't pipe all that well without a flashlight, but they did sculpt the inner iris-circle. The arms are past his knees and bigger at the forearms than the upper arms, and they also sport significant windshield kibble inside at the midpoint, it's definitely not attractive left straight like that; but luckily they look much better bent all the way at the elbow, brought up to a more reasonable height. If one were a fan of the show design, they'd be confused by these arms, they don't deliver at all what the show art does, there's a pretense at the forearms but it's quite half-assed, and then there's door kibble on the outside and windshield kibble, and the shoulders stick out -- but I'm not terribly bothered since I'm not heavily invested in that character, so it's only the length and window kibble for me. The hands are big open hands, not gigantic but the big like someone who works with his hands for a living, they're open-C shaped with the thumb doing a lot of the work, and they have a natural sculpt to that pose despite being a clean 5mm circular opening. The figure's wings end up as an odd thing, they are 45-degree splits from the roof middle halves, they're not really what the doctor ordered and yet they're working for me as suggestive of the concept while unique. The legs look good, the lower legs mix the concept of the front end as legs with the boots concept we've seen more recently, and since he gets separate feet from the front end, it pays off overall. The deco adds a more gray and black to the mix which mixes it up nicely, but oddly there's no Autobot logo on this figure anywhere, especially not the little white spot at the middle of his chest that the character art consistently shows.
Articulation is pretty good for a smaller deluxe figure, there's a ball-jointed neck that can turn and look up quite a ways; restricted ball-jointed shoulders on hinges that can shrug up a few degrees, plus barrel receivers in the shoulders that let the shoulders rotate on the vertical axis; a hinge at the biceps; a hinge at the elbows; restricted ball-jointed wrists that lead into vertical axis-hinged hands; restricted ball-jointed hips that allow side-kicking, attached to rotation joints at the top of the thighs; hinged knees; and ball-jointed feet where the joint is sideways out the outside, but it works and looks better than any previous attempt I can think of. The jointing allows for some expressive poses, and the feet are just the right size and jointing to keep it upright in action poses, although they might be too narrow for 1-footed poses (I have mine in one now, but it has enough wobble that it won't stay that way over a few hours without help). The elbows and knees don't have as much range of motion as I'd like, they're more like 75 degrees instead of 90 or even 110 that I'd prefer, but his elements would block the lower legs anyway; the upper arms have the bicep hinges to somewhat compensate for their range issues. I would have liked to have seen a bicep rotation joint instead of that oddball barrel receiver rotation joint they use, I find that lack of bicep rotation the single most noticed joint missing whenever I hit the wall in a pose with Wheeljack, the lack of waist joint doesn't factor anywhere near as close. The joints are all tight and solid; the figure's stability is pretty good overall. The shins do rotate out of position a little when handled, and posing the figure usually folds the knee points flat; the right "wing" seems to de-transform on its own quite a bit on mine, but it looks like a "your mileage will vary" situation.
Robot Mode: 8 / 10 (or 7/10 if you are a stickler about show-accuracy)
So, getting back to the accessories now for robot mode to complete that conversation... The swords fit in the hands quite well and hold, the figure clearly is designed to wield these twin curved swords, his arm articulation and even neck tilting up just open the figure to a myriad of sword poses. The swords are long, as apparently they were on the show, although clearly thicker to A) not break, and B) fit in the hands, but the long arms do work with the swords' length. The only thing about posing I could say is an issue is - and it's a small thing - that the door kibble on the arms extends out past the wrists and the sword hilts have those plastic pommel/facade hilt-ends and the sideways 5mm pegs which all get in the way during rotation from about 5 degrees to 60 degrees, but from there out the figure can hold the swords out to the side just fine as long as you remove them before rotating the hand into another position. The swords can be pegged into the shoulders thanks to the 5mm holes from the rear fenders ending up there, but even better, the swords fit into cut-aways behind his shoulders - it's not mentioned in the instructions, but just outside of the wings and inside the shoulders in the back is a pair of square cut-outs to stow the blades, roughly where they were stowed on the show, although the hilts stick way up here due to the nature of, you know, "reality". So the swords are cool, he looks good wielding them, they stow away, yay; but why the hell does a figure with a firepower of 8 and a GIANT gun-hand showing on the packaging have... no gun at all? I don't get that, he already doesn't get his shoulder launcher. I gave him DOTM Sideswipe's big gun, it looks a hell of a lot better in Wheeljack's bigger arms, plus it has that sword gimmick so it still plays well here - WJ is keeping that damned gun! (No accessory for you Sideswipe, sorry, maybe if you hadn't been gray instead of silver, ya loser.) The swords are cool, not entirely color-accurate, but decent enough; they're just not all this figure should have, there's the big gun situation, and there's the grenade on the hip.
Accessories: 7 / 10
Overall, I like this Wheeljack figure in both modes, I like the transformation, the deco is ok but could be better, it's a bit small for the price, and while decently-articulated, it could use more articulation and range of motion. There's a lot of personality here and a lot of style without being painfully stylized.
Overall Score: 8 / 10 - Pretty Good