Shock
Trooper
The Shock Trooper's alternate
mode is a V-Wing Starfighter, and as you'd expect from a Star Wars Transformer
the alt mode is pretty dead-on. The proportions are more or less perfect
(the vertical wings are a TINY bit smaller than they should be, but that's
it), and no real robot extras unless you look on the underside of the vehicle.
The mold detailing is great, with all the mechanical lines and detailing
you'd expect from a Star Wars figure, along with an as-usual fairly boring
color scheme of off-white, dark red/maroon, and light gray. Kinda wish
they'd mix up these color schemes a bit more, but given that's how they
often are in the show of course, I can understand why they don't do so.
By pressing on the small knobs in the center where each half of the vertical
wing rotates around, you can fire a weird two-pronged missile out of each
side of the vehicle. In addition his middle landing gear can flip up and
out of the way, though the landing gear on each wing is stuck there (of
course, but spreading the wings so it's "in flight" you effectively get
rid of those landing gears).
Shock Trooper's mech
mode is the one that suffers from the transformation, but more of it has
to do with the sheer simplicity of his transformation to the point where
just a few more parts here and there would've helped make Shock Trooper
look cooler. I do like his chest design with all the molded cables going
down to the waist, and the way part of his vehicle shell becomes a sort
of warrior "skirt" for his upper legs. The legs overall are pretty well-done
themselves proportionally. His legs are really wonky, though, with teeny
tiny upper arms with the smaller wings from the V-Wing mold just clipped
on them that really get in the way and look weird. Having his larger wings
hang backwards off his elbows-- which lead into comically enormous lower
arms with the hands merely molded into the pieces-- just looks plain bad.
On a more minor compliant, his head sculpt is a little "off" somehow in
a way that's hard to explain-- slightly asymmetrical?-- and his cockpit
coming down from behind his legs can get in the way of movement a bit.
As far as articulation goes, he can move at the neck, shoulders, elbows
(at two points), wrists, waist, hips (at two points), elbows (at two points),
and ankles. His wings and some odd design choices can limit some of this
movement, though, particularly at the waist/hips area and the shoulders.
Shock Trooper is kind
of a meh Star Wars Transformer. Nice vehicle mode, but there are some really
odd design decisions done to his overly simplistic robot mode design that
really prevent him from being as good of a toy as he could. He's not outright
bad, but as far as this line goes you can do a lot better.
Review by Beastbot