By Loran
And once again, I find myself reviewing Megatron…
I wasn’t too big on the design for Megatron in Transformers Prime originally. It just felt like a shameless rehash of his design from the first movie, only scarier. But well, Frank Welker’s performance as him really sold me on it. Heck, I didn’t even recognize him at first. It’s much better than the voice he used in the games for the live-action movies, that’s for sure.
In vehicle mode, Megatron is a… thing. Okay, I usually don’t mind Cybertronian alt-modes but god, this thing is just weird. It’s like Megatron tried to scan a Klingon Bird of Prey and got distracted and scanned a pile of metal halfway into it. I just can’t get over the exposed head in this mode. It’s too silly even for me. Everything IS quite stable in this mode, though. Many of the parts peg into other parts nicely and securely.
Megatron’s transformation drives me nuts. But not in the bad way, I guess. It’s that good kind of complex that’ll actually stump you. Either way, he has way too many hinged parts. They really clash against each other and I’m always worried I’m gonna break one of them off.
Despite all that, though, holy crap is this robot mode menacing. All the glowing translucent purple plastic looks so good here, and I really wish purple showed up better on my camera. It’s like he has Dark Energon flowing right through his body. His plastic is even textured, too, making him even feel like a crazy, war-mongering Decepticon general. Unfortunately, as cool as the textured plastic is, the gray color just doesn’t do it for me. It feels a little too light, though the dark color in the animation may just be due to the lighting conditions in the show.
His face is sufficiently nasty and creepy, but I’m a bit disappointed by the lack of red eyes. Considering how many figures I’ve seen with nerfed light piping lately, I’m actually surprised they didn’t paint his pupils. The purple eyes just get kind of lost in his face. I might repaint the eyes at some point and see how that looks.
I really have a problem with all this crap on his back. It’s a shame it has nowhere to go, but I guess it could be worse.
His articulation is decent, but his spiky-by-nature design inhibits him somewhat. He also lacks a waist joint, but again, it doesn’t hurt him so much.
Megatron’s finally got his old fusion cannon back, and it’s here in the form of some crazy mechtech weapon. It’s pretty cool, but I don’t think it can lock into place like the Voyager mechtech weapons from Dark of the Moon. It certainly looks awesome, though.
But that cannon pales into comparison to this totally awesome claw. Oh man. As if Megatron wasn’t scary enough. I bet he doesn’t use this against the Autobots… it’s something he uses to punish Starscream for misbehaving. Oh that sounded dirty, didn’t it…
Prime Megatron isn’t perfect, but he’s a totally worthwhile purchase. Maybe we’ll get a better one somewhere down the road, but this one fits the bill just fine, I think. I’m just happy to have the “Big 3” Decepticons already. 😀
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