When Your Hit Percentage Exceeds Mine….. FOC Shockwave

Well here we are, I have some quite time and figured I’d get ‘Ol Shockers done.

Shockwave is one of those characters that everyone loves.  He’s the bad ass Spock of the Transformers world and his Generations 2012 figure does the guy great justice!  Shockwave is based on his War For Cybertron DLC character model, seen here in the greatest commercial ever produced:

Shockwave is pretty amazing but there is one aspect that’s kind of odd.  The instructions don’t show you how to attach his cannon arm correctly.  According the the instructions, they have him holding the gun like so:

What the instructions neglect to mention is that by folding in one of the hands, you then expose a slot attachment for the cannon to fit snugly over his whole forearm, Like So:

 

 

Shockwave’s head sculpt is fantastic and the detailing around his neck and collar are great,  but….everyone knows Shockwave’s eye is yellow, not pink.  I realize they did this so that the light piping works (and boy, it works great!) but I may considered painting over it with yellow/gold.   I’m not sure yet.

His iconic Chest design is spot on too!   Oddly enough though, you can see two screws below the chest (one is partially visible here) – a very rare instance in most Transformer figures, and I wonder if Reprolables will come out with a set that will include cover stickers for these two screws.
Another cool feature, Shockwave’s cannon barrel can be removed to expose a different gun type very similar to the X-12 Scrapmaker in War for Cybertron.  Part of the “gimmick” for this line is that the weapons will be sort of interchangeable to imitate the various weapons each character can pick up in the game.

Here’s Prime holding the Scrapmaker:

Speaking of which, here’s a size comparison to Optimus:

Now on to his Alt-mode.

There seems to be some kind of confusion on whether he’s a jet or a tank, but I’m going by WFC DLC cannon, so he’s a jet.  A Cybertronian jet.

If you look closely, you can see the top of his head and ears “molded” into the center piece.  A touch of silver paint for the “ears” would do nicely I think.

Another cool “Secret feature”, in both WFC and FOC, each vehicle has two “Modes” – hover/stealth and “Boost”.  You can flip Shockwave’s wings back (and I flip the feet fully horizontal) to create his “boost” mode:

Seems I don’t have G1 Bumblebee with me, here’s a vehicle size comparison with Prime:

 

I haven’t opened Jazz yet, I’ll do that when I return, but I think its safe to say Shockwave really is the best of all three.  Unlike many collectors though, I do like all three figures very much so.  I really look forward to looking at Jazz and I already have some ideas for him in terms of slight mods.

 

 

That’s all for now –  when I return I have a LARGE number of figures to look at including:

Bruticus (I plan on doing each figure separately, then the big guy at at the end.)

FOC Jazz

Asia Exclusive Cliff Jumper

Asia Exclusive Swerve

G1 Buzzsaw (maybe.  I finally tracked down a decent enough figure, so we’ll see)

Stay Tuned!