Allegiance: Decepticon
Size: Deluxe
Difficulty of Transformation: Easy
Japanese Name: Dolrailer
Color Scheme: Light orange, dark army green, light army green, black, gray, and some pinkish red
Mold History: Mega-Octane's mold dates all the way back to 1986, when the mold was released as the Combaticon Onslaught, part of the original Transformers line.
Rating: 6.7

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    Vehicle mode is a mobile artillery flatbed truck. This mode is very nice, overall. It's rather long, too- about a foot total! I like how the front of the robot hands create the front grill in vehicle mode, it's a rather creative idea. Unfortunately, one can tell that this is a rather old mold- the mold detailing is pretty poor except for in a few isolated places. Mega-Octane's main weapon is a large double-barreled cannon in this mode, although you can attach his robot mode gun on the top of it for some triple-barrel action. My main problem with Mega-Octane in this mode isn't so much what it CAN do, but what it CAN'T. Mega-Octane comes with a veritable plethora of extra parts (see picture above), but the only one that he can store in this mode is his robot gun. Rather poor design-wise, if you ask me. There's nothing I hate more than having to get an extra baggie to put extra Transformers stuff in. Mega-Octane also has his Decepticon insignia planted rather oddly in this mode; is completely on the upper-top portion of the hood of the truck, and it looks very odd and asymetrical in that position. Placing the symbol in the middle would have made it look much better.

    Mega-Octane also has a "base mode", although it's really not so much of a base as it is a ramp with some guns on the end. This mode is very neat, at least visually. The ramp, cannon and "base" all seem to fit together nicely. However, the ramp piece simply does not connect into the little latch indent in the base portion. So, if you so much as blow on the ramp piece, it moves a bit. Blah, that could have been fixed easily! Also, the cannon part fits on top of Mega-Octane's robot head in this mode, but it doesn't fit in snugly, and it tends to wobble a bit more than I'd like. These two things are what ruin the mode for me. If it wasn't for these easily-fixable problems, then I'd have no problem with this mode except for the somewhat blatant truck-front halves on the back sides.

    You can definitely tell that Mega-Octane's an old mold in his robot mode. His articulation only consists of his shoulders being able to move, his upper arms, and his head. That's it. Well, his legs can technically move at the knees, but only in the wrong direction, so it makes him look extremely odd if you keep the legs in any position except the one shown above. Now that the camoflauge paint is mostly out-of-the-way in this mode, Mega-Octane also becomes rather bland in this mode, with almost no paint detailing, and minimal mold detailing. He's just boring, really. The toy also comes with a chestplate for this mode (shown connected above), but it serves no real purpose except to have an extra part lying around in other modes. It's not like it has any cool paint detailing or anything on it, it's just a piece of dark army green plastic. The robot mode still looks alright structurally (well, except for the oddly-shaped arms), but it's in definite need of some eye candy. Not to mention that you can't store any of the Ruination parts in any of his modes, so that gets really annoying.
    Makes up the main body and upper legs of Ruination.
    With his lackluster detailing and articulation, Mega-Octane falls below the bar for a deluxe toy these days. With all his extra parts, Mega-Octane's technically the size of a Mega, but I'm glad Hasbro packaged him as deluxe- an older mold such as this probably wouldn't have sold that well at a Mega price point. In short, this toy may have cut it back in the '80s, but it certainly doesn't in 21st century.

Review by Beastbot

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