Transformers Studio Series The The Movie Astrotrain review

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Matthew 11: 28

Aloha folks, I am back with another Tf review and today in Studio Series 86 Astrotrain. Is he good? Does he suck? Or is he one of those, its so bad, its so good figures? Lets get started!

 Boxing

Well, as you can see he is lacking his abdominal paint. You can clearly see it in his character portrait. You also have folks from the net using acrylic paint to paint those areas. I mean seriously Hasbro? What the heck? 

Astrotrain

 

As you can see, he came in his Five faces of darkness pose. You got two guns, 3 blast effects, and a smoke effect which looks good on his train mode. More on this later. So first off, he is really slender. Not in a good way. The joke is he jettisoned all his weight for this release from the net. Which he really did. He is lacking lots of paint apps especially on his abs as I mentioned earlier. He has sleds for the bottom of his feet which looks out of place to be honest. I didn't include this shot though he has wrist swivels, and when you swivel that fist, his fist doesn't look aligned to his wrist. It looks as if its almost popping off. For my figure the head portion didn't really stick on and it can't stop flopping backwards. His back kibble is already heavy enough to keep him from standing up well in an already starved looking figure. In general, this guy just looks very incomplete. Everything about him just feels and looks wrong. Awkward looking legs, bland looking torso, generic looking hands and all.... I don't want to go too long on this.

The positives though are, well, his head is ok looking. He comes with some cool accessories. He does have a bunch of swivels. He does have an open fist though only his non-thumbs fingers are one big flap of fingers and that is that. 

The different ways to display his chest

So I guess as a triple changer, you have three ways to display his chest. You get even get the toy method (2nd pic). As plain as it is, I display him the way he came with all those grey panels. It's bland but I actually prefer it like that. Even his toy display isn't painted. Lame. 

Choo choo train 

A pain in the arse to get to if you didn't use instructions. The front portion of the wheels are probably the hardest to get to without some kind of instruction. This is the part where you got these hinges on top of the shuttle mode which I will get to later on again. This is the best mode unfortunately for AT. Even so, how many of you are gonna really keep him on display for this mode? The smoke effect really works wonders here and it was pretty much made for this mode. It does seem like most of the focus was concentrated on this one mode. The locomotive wheels cycle in this mode which gives it a cool touch. 

Perspective

I think it should be AT that should be up front and whoever is trying to enter him in more in the background. But I didn't have much room on this table so I did the best I could. 

Shuttle

So this is AT's mid mode. It ain't terrible but its not the best either. Getting him here from the train mode is actually fairly easy though it took some time as well. The hinges as you could see form the upper middle part of this mode and surrounding that area just feels like a mess. I think people like the cockpit for how it looks but half way towards the end, I guess AT had to jettison some outer parts as well to get his fellow Decepticons back to Cybertron after fleeing the battle for Autobot City. The wings in this mode don't really stay parallel, it kind of flaps up. The landing wheels can only be done by flipping out the purple looking underbelly. Man they really rushed this guy. 

Conclusion

So I had to get this guy because I wanted to see how bad or great he turned out. Turns out leaning more towards the former. Just his robot mode is the biggest bummer in this whole fiasco they called the apology tour of Hasbro. They knew what they were doing, hence, the apology. If you want AT for alt modes, then I say he is decent though they really got cute with the engineering here and it can upset you trying to make all this work. I'm going to say hold off getting this guy. Unless if third party upgrades can really rectify this mess, you are better off getting a third party AT if you desperately need one now. Can Amazon just ship my Kranix already? He is the only one that seems like Hasbro really made an effort in this pitiful release of 86 40th anniversary figures. Anyhow, Jesus loves you. Jesus is king, Jesus wants a relationship with you. Take care.