I’ve sort of ranted and raved on these pages before about Mattel’s putrid looking Avatar toyline…it retails for 2 bucks more than G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, yet the figures lack most of the detail and all of the charm of the G.I. Joe toys. Where Hasbro’s offerings manage to cram a ton of sculpt and tooling detail into the 3 3/4″ scale as well as a ton of accessories, the Avatar items look more like emotionless slabs of 4 inch plastic with very few accessories and zero spirit. Pure licensed “blech”.
But one bright spot appeared to be the vehicles, especially the absolutely kick ass looking dual-engine attack craft that resembled the Sigma 6 Dragonhawk. Alas, various posters on HissTank, and in other places have revealed that not even that vehicle saves the line, as it ends up being too small to really work well for the Rise of Cobra figures (or vintage figures for that matter).
But, apparently that’s not the case for the Mech suit! Nas, a frequent GeneralsJoes commenter has his own blog site, and he took some neat pictures of the Avatar mech suit, and it looks to work quite nicely with the Rise of Cobra figures! Joe fans who have been clamoring for an Aliens-style power loader, or even just a kick ass Mech assault suit need look no further. So far, this seems to be the biggest bright spot for the Avatar toys, let’s hope the movie itself is better…
no images were found
I saw these at target, what is the Non G.I Joe toy world coming to!?
Sweet! Glad to see some pics; I was thinking of picking that up. Looks great, for twenty bucks!
Thanks for the shout-out, Justin!
@Alexx, yes, I was very surprised and pleased, especially for the price. I’m also a “mech-head”, so this works on multiple levels for me. This is a good toy, regardless of the rest of the line. I am VERY tempted to pick up a couple more for some ideas I have, but I’ll have to measure that against trying to find some of the new Joes as they hit vs. my monthly toy “allowance”, as it were.
I picked one of these up last week; it looks pretty nice, but the engineering is a bit shoddy. The mech comes in a half-dozen pieces, and the arms and legs have hex-shaped pegs that attach into hex-shaped holes in the torso. There aren’t any hooks on the arm or leg pegs to lock them into place once they’re attached, and several times while trying to move a leg at the “hip” the leg ended up popping off. Since this is a display item for me it’s not a huge deal, but it’s a problem that other toy lines solved with a clip on the peg and a notch in the hole 20 years ago.
Ultimately, I think the AMP Suit is a nice-looking display item; but I also thought it was just barely worth the $20 I paid for it at Target. As I’ve thought more about it over the last few days it seems like it might make a nice Steel Brigade vehicle; I’m going to pair it with a RoC Pit Commando and see how it looks with him.
I’ll probably also pick up the RDA Grinder at some point (looks like a nice potential Dreadnok bike), but after my experience with the AMP suit I have relatively middle-of-the-road expectations for it.