Decepticon Bludgeon

Allegiance: Decepticon
Size: Mini-Con
Difficulty of Transformation: Very Easy
Color Scheme: Black, dark purple, and some dull red
Individual Rating: 5.6

    Bludgeon's ball mode is more of a "medieval-looking" mace/ball... if that makes any sense. (Hey, they have to distinguish all these ball Mini-Cons somehow!) On the front end, there's what looks a bit like a face, with red-painted "eyes" and curved details around that center portion that actually make it look like an angry face with a curly mustache... interesting. There's also some fairly wide spikes on the side, including a rather ingenious use of the feet as two additional spikes. Compared to the front, the sides of the ball mode are relatively light on detailing on the top, while the bottom are fairly obvious robot bits. The hands are pretty darned obvious from the detailing in the middle of the sides, which is the biggest issue. The legs are also somewhat obvious on the bottom of the sides, but that's only because of the color-- otherwise they fit in pretty well detailing-wise. Still, even with the hands, none of them mess with the overall silhouette, and look pretty decent. Color-wise, Bludgeon is almost entirely black, with the aforementioned red eyes, and then the hands and legs on the bottom (along with a little part on the top that's used for transformation) being a fairly dark shade of purple. Obviously it's a pretty Decepticon-y color scheme, but as with most Minicons, he needs more paint to really bring out all those details, especially on the front of this mode. At least in this mode as well, the purple works to its disadvantage, since despite the addition of another color, it really makes obvious the robot mode bits near the bottom and sides-- if they were black, they really wouldn't stick out.
    To get Bludgeon to robot mode, you just take the "seam" in the middle of the back of the ball mode and rotate the sides out, which automatically transforms the rest of the toy (though you have to rotate the lower arms down). In robot mode-- in keeping with the "medieval" look of his alt mode-- Bludgeon looks like a short armored knight, chubby to the point where it eliminates pretty much any "eeeevil Decepticon" threat you may otherwise get from him. He's definitely got a very round body and ridiculously large shoulder pads made out of the sides, which look all the bigger given the teeeny tiny lower arms. I mean, it's basically just his hands there, folks, there's practically no lower arms to speak of. His legs are pretty decent, with some nice "segmented" detailing that looks a bit similar to knight armor. The head looks straight-up like an evil knight, with small purple horns on the side, a detailed faceguard with vents on the front, and two dark red eyes from deep within the helmet. The headsculpt is extremely well done and the best part of this mode, in my opinion. Unfortunately, beyond the head and the two "eyes" on the chest, that's it as far as paint goes. For articulation, Bludgeon's hands can move inwards, but that's it-- though this is pretty much the norm for RID2015 Mini-Cons, sadly (if they can move at all in robot mode).
 
 

Optimus Prime

Allegiance: Autobot
Difficulty of Transformation: Very Easy
Color Scheme: Moderately dark milky semi-metallic blue, black, moderately dark red, transparent light pale orange, and some silver and moderately light blue
Individual Rating: 6.9

    Optimus Prime's vehicle mode is a stylized truck w/ a trailer; you're probably pretty familiar with it by now. The overall look of this mode is definitely secondary to the robot mode look, though, as this toy takes the general construction of the Legion class toy and... well... messes with it. The arms become the top of the trailer and the legs the bottom of the trailer, but they don't fit in seemlessly with the rest of the vehicle mode. There's a REALLY obvious and obnoxious gap on the bottom of the toy between the back end of the cab and where the lower legs form the back half of the trailer-- there should've been little fold-up panels to hide those obvious upper legs and close the gap. The arms also don't reach back as far as the legs, so the trailer ends at the top earlier than it ends on the bottom, making the legs VERY obvious and also just looking weird. The hand detailing on the end of the trailer section is also pretty obvious, as well. Dark blue, black, and red are the main colors, though the red is just a titch darker than on most other RID2015 Optimus toys. The mold detailing is the usual for a RID2015 toy; it's pretty sparse in places like the top of this mode, but there's surprisingly intricate, angular, stylized detailing on the cab section with angular side doors and a grill, little smokestacks on the sides, the usual trio of diagonal divots on each side of the trailer section, and pretty intricate detailing on the wheels, with even little tiny "bolts" mixed in! On the back end there's little details of the rear bumper and taillights-- they're not painted, unfortunately, though at least the fact that Hasbro remembered to detail the back end this time is a slight improvement. Paint-wise Optimus is pretty sparse; he's got black paint on the front window and on the foot "hooves" on the back end, and silver on the smokestacks, but that's it. It's rather unfortunate as particularly all that unpainted plastic on the trailer portion really could've used some paint to help the red and blue mix together better back there, and maybe add some highlights.
    His shoulders sort of fold up on an extra hinge, but otherwise the transformation is again pretty similar to the Legion class toy's, with the only real extra being the truck cab section on the back. It sticks up a bit more here than on the Legion class toy, though, and it does stick out from the sides of the chest section a bit. However, it stays out of the way of articulation and is a minor extra overall. The hands are also mostly molded into the sections that become the top of the trailer-- there's angles coming off of them that form the edges of that trailer section-- but again, overall this is a pretty small issue. Otherwise, Optimus is very proportional in this mode, with nice proportional shoulders, arms, and legs. (Yes, his upper legs are pretty small in comparison to his lower legs, but this is fairly accurate to the show model.) The new paint apps are black on his faux cab-chest and silver on his face and forehead vent, as well as some light blue on the eyes; otherwise there's no new paint apps, so again, he really could use some more highlights. That said, his headsculpt is pretty spot-on, with a pretty stern look on his face, and the details on his chest are also pretty accurate to the show, with a faux angular truck "window" on the center and abs below said area. The black pieces on the sides and bottom of the main body kinda break up that area in a bad way, though-- not only is it not accurate to the show model, but it looks kinda odd and obscures all that excellent mold detailing. He's also got a few minor angular details on his legs, but otherwise they're pretty sparse, and they aren't painted either, unfortunately. Optimus is pretty articulated in this mode-- he can move at the neck, shoulders (at two points), elbows, hips, and knees, with most of those on balljoints-- given that's he's quite well-balanced, this means he can get into a lot of cool poses.
    Unlike most of the other packs with Mini-Cons, the Mini-Con battle packs come with extra armor parts for the main Transformer, not the Mini-Con! For Optimus Prime, he comes with light pale orange transparent parts that give some much-needed brightness to his color scheme. I wish they were a bit less pale in their color, but they're still a pretty nice shade. As armor parts, he comes with an axe (as Optimus usually has); two armor parts on his lower legs that have little angled blade bits coming out; similar parts on his shoulders; and a chest piece that has a flip-up part that goes over his face to form a cool knight-like mask. In addition, all of the different parts can combine to form a mega weapon; you peg in the arm and shoulder bits onto the front of the axe with the blade parts pointing forward to form a MEGA warhammer, and the chest/mask piece sorta hangs off the back end of the weapon without really doing anything. It's a REALLY cool weapon, I love it to bits. We need more TFs with warhammers. Another really cool addition is that there's a small tab in the handle of the warhammer that corresponds to a little hole on the top of Optimus' trailer in vehicle mode, so he CAN actually carry the warhammer in vehicle mode as well!

    He has some positives, but overall the Mini-Con Battle Pack with Optimus Prime and Bludgeon is one of the weakest in the size class. Optimus has a pretty nice robot mode, but a very poor vehicle mode and desperately needs more paint apps. His armor bits are really cool, however, and they form a killer weapon. Bludgeon has a unique medieval look to him with his detailing, but his robot mode is so chunky it looks kinda doofy outside of the cool-looking helmet-head.
 

Reviews by Beastbot

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