Spy Troops Wave 2 (Wave 6) - Beachhead
Looking back upon Wave 3, it seems like such a departure from what direction Hasbro was going in. Wave 2 had some specific style to it, but was firmly grounded in reality...Waves 4 and 5 took reality even another step further. Wave 3, right in the middle of those waves threw reality right out the window and produced a series of oddly shaped, strangely styled figures...the figures are nice in their own right, but upon hindsight, do not fit in very well with the other GvC offerings. Figures like Flint just look odd when with other figures due to the exaggerated size of his legs and feet. Dr Mindbender fits in to a certain degree, but his sculpt is significantly anime-based and he looks only barely grounded in the real world. The Baroness turned out the same way.
One figure that didn't suffer quite so much from the crazy cartoon style of this wave was Beachhead. While he did have some huge hands, the rest of him was pretty intricately sculpted with lots of great little details in the mold, and some very nice paint apps. His legs were slightly bow-legged (but easily fixed), but the key was in the details. His vest and shoulder pad combo works well, and is adorned nicely with pouches, ammo and a grenade. Even nicer placement was on the belt, which holds two grenades on the back...again, these grenades are fantastically detailed and add a lot to the figure. The lower body is equally nice with the pants, kneepads and nice wrapped boots. So, in the vein, the figure is still desirable.
But it pretty much ends there. This figure's colors are a lot less appealing than the original Wave 3 version. his cool olive green shirt is replaced by an almost tan/mustard yellow one, obviously meant to work in a desert environment. His pants are now brown based camouflaged, with the trim still in black. Overall, not a huge difference in the color schemes, but enough of one to make this figure even less pleasing than the last version. His colors aren't bad, mind you, but I'd much rather have the darker hues, and this scheme doesn't really work for him.
One plus to this figure, though, are the new accessories he comes with. He has the standard Beachhead issue rifle, but now also comes with a very cool small pistol that I haven't seen anywhere before. It's similar in style to Blackout's, but smaller and a really nice little sculpt. Also, Beachhead comes with another cool new pistol...this one appears to be either a grenade launcher or flare gun. No matter what it's purpose is, it looks neat, realistic, and like something that's fun to play with.
All in all, though, there is really nothing else that remarkable about this figure...if you have the Wave 3 version, there's nothing to look for here...but the fact that he is packaged with Sand Viper, one of the greatest GvC figures we've seen to date, it assures that plenty of Joefans will get stuck with more of these than they'd like to admit.
