Beast Machines Nightscream

One of the K-Marts I frequent had a buttload of these back before Christmas, but I never picked one up and they ended up being gone by November. However, one resurfaced today, and I decided to shell out the $20 (rang up $19.98 actually) and grab it. Geh, bad move on my part, I'd say.

Okay, so Nightscream is a techno-organic bat. However, in the box (which he's secured into with way too many twisty ties) he looks like he's been run over by a truck or something. I had a dandy time getting him to resemble a bat from that, um, 'mode'.

Once you get him into bat mode he's pretty cool looking, though the color scheme could have had a bit more thought put into it. It's primarily brown and orange, which isn't so much of a problem, but there's a good deal of light blue in it as well and it just doesn't seem like a good color to have to me. A different shade or brown or something that fit into the scheme would have looked a lot less out of place.

Nightscream's major gimmick is a disc launcher that resides in his beast back. Pull it up and spin it around and his eyes will light up and he can fire discs out of his back. The gimmick would be cool, except it really gets in the way a lot when it's deployed and it's impossible to fold it back up if you haven't fired the discs yet.

The discs remind me a lot of Depth Charge, only there's only three of them and they fly pretty far. They also don't fall out easily as the door that holds them in is pretty tight. You have no idea how many times I spilled all of Depth Charge's discs when I was transforming him. Damn crap.

Anyways, Nightscream's bat mode is neat, but it's tough to figure out what to do with his legs, which also become his robot legs. For standing I find a pretty neat looking pose is to have them under his body so his head and body are parallel to the ground. This holds up pretty well, and is one of the few poses that's both stable and cool looking.

Also it's worth note that Jetstorm is positivly huge. I have Rampage, another ultra sized toy, standing on top of my computer, and Nightscream dwarfs him. If anything they might have been able to get away with selling him at a super price point, though with that price (usually $30) he probably would have faced the same fate as Supreme Cheetor.

He has a third mode, which is essentially a 'walk on his wings' mode. It's called claw attack mode, but it looks like some sort of weird bat-swingset hybrid. Yes, swingset. I won't go into it much, you can just check out the picture.

Transformation to robot mode isn't too tough, but satisfying. It's interesting to note, too, that Nightscream's beast head ends up enclosed in his hips, and his robot head suffers the same fate in beast mode. Yep, he's a crotch-head.

Anyway, robot mode is actually massive. Okay, massive is a bad way to describe it. It's tall. The only Beast Machines toy that's taller is Supreme Cheetor. Heck, he even beats out Optimal Optimus in height, so he's taller than all Beast Wars toys as well.

Aside from his height, though, there's nothing else that's overly impressive. He sports the same bad color scheme as in beast mode, but now his cool looking bat head has been replaced by his stupid looking robot head. Actually, as far as robot heads go, this one is really a human face with a few weird additions, mainly his eyes and nose. And the hair. Ugh. The horror!

So, all in all, is Nightscream worth it? Well, given the large size of the toy and the pretty neat gimmick, he's probably worth $20, but I wouldn't pay any more that that by any means. The bad color scheme, lack of decent joints (ball jointed wrists and some decent ankles would have been nice) and the pretty ugly looking robot mode make Nightscream an addition you might only want to add if you're a completist or a Nightscream fan (and there aren't many Nightscream fans out there). Also, word of advice, when you display him, keep him in bat mode. Robot mode is starting to creep me out actually, he looks like he's starving to death. If you can find one for $10 or $15 it's definetly worth it, but $20 was a bit steep for me. Could have had more cash to fill up my gas tank. Ah well.