Built To Rule - Rising Tide
I've tried to make it obvious that Barrel Roll is by far my favorite new character of this G.I. Joe revival, and so far that fact has stood firm. Even when they toss him in with a BTR vehicle, take away his swivel wrists and cobble lego pegs on his arms and legs...
I continue to be completely befuddled by the Built To Rule offerings. Some are completely amazing (like the Armadillo, Mocassin, and Night Raven) but some are completely uninspired (the Rock Crusher & Forest Fox). And still others drop somewhere in between. So far this newest series of BTR offerings have been firmly in the middle.
The Sand Snake was okay...but it's shining grace was the absolutely fantastic new Firefly figure it came with. Surprisingly, the same thing holds true here.
I figured I'd be buying this vehicle purely for completist reasons. Eight dollars was a small price to pay to get the Barrel Roll figure, and since I'm a BR fan anyway, it only made sense to pick this thing up. Little did I know that I would actually really, really like this rendition of Barrel Roll!
But first, the vehicle...
Unfortunately I can't tell you a lot about the boat version of this thing, simply because it looked too silly to even build. I had no idea why a pilot/high altitude sniper like Barrel Roll would be tooling around in a little orange speedboat, so the instant I saw that the second mode was a pretty neat looking little airplane, I immediately set out on making that instead.
And for a second mold, the plane is actually pretty neat...I think it mihgt have done Hasbro well to market this vehicle under that mode instaed of the strange boat they did, especially considering that it looks like ole Chief Torpedo is coming with a boat as well.
In boat form, this vehicle suffers from too little, too late. It almost looks like the illegitimate child of the Devilfish, but everything the Devilfish does right, this boat does wrong. It looks slim and streamlined, but in boat form the lack of controls really stands out. Barrel Roll basically looks like he's sitting there on a little platform and driving this thing with his mind. Everything seems cobbled onto the top rear of the structure, and it just seems completely unusable as any sort of attack craft at all.
Thankfully, the plane, while being hit a little of the same, is considerably better than the boat mode, although not enough-so to warrant integration into the "real" G.I. Joe team.
The flat, angled pieces that make up the boat's angled hull are used here to create the plane's wings, and work very well in that regard. Even with those wide wings, though, the small aircraft still looks streamlined and quick enough to work as a miniature recon plane, or even a light attack vehicle. Nothing that would ever go head-to-head with a Rattler (or a Night Adder, for that matter) but a nice compliment to some other aircraft en route to an evac. I could see it as a small gunship flying alongside the Conquest, Skystriker and Night Attack Chopper, working with Tigerhawk's to intercept and keep bogey's at bay. But I don't think it works quite well enough in appearence to fit in with those other excellent aircraft.
The front of the plane is sloped nicely and looks aerodynamic enough to be part of an aircraft, but like the boat, the pilot is woefully inprotected. There's no way Barrel Roll is flying at 300-400 MPH through the high altitude skies with an open cockpit and zero protection. As such, this would seem more a ground attack fighter than anything. Of course the BTR pamphlet (and box) refer to this mode as a "jet glider" so I suppose it's mean to be a glorified recon craft meant to silently glide through the night skies for spying missions or covert Ops. Whatever designation it gets, it doesn't really do anything well. It's not a bad vehicle, but it's just nothing special.
As strange as it seems, though, the pilot, Barrel Roll is something special.
I didn't notice it all upon first glance of the figure and even when playing around with it a little bit, but they did some considerable resculpting of this figure, making it almost completely different from the original Barrel Roll figure, and a lot of the cosmetic changes they made are for the better. Below is a comparison shot:
First of all, there is no doubt that they used the original Barrel Roll's head as a template, but the new head almost looks like a completely new sculpt! It's smaller and rounder, with a sharper nose and a more detailed look to it. The added five o'clock shadow looks really nice as well, considering one of his duties is hanging out in the field for days on end waiting to take a sniper shot, having some facial growth makes sense. At any rate, the new face sculpt is a lot sharper and a lot nicer, I think.
Secondly, the torso- where the original has a flat "undershirt" beneath the outer jacket, this new one has that section hollowed out. It makes for a better range of motion and some nice activity by the bottom of the collar of the jacket. The overall torso almost looks shrunk down a little bit as well, cut down closer to the pouches on the jacket. Plus, of course, the bottoms of the arms and the legs are BTR molds instead of the standard Barrel Roll parts, and the overall effect is a considerably shorter figure. I think this strongly suggests that Hasbro, as a whole, is toning down the figure scales towards a more "standard buck". Both Firefly and Barrel Roll (as well as Shipwreck and Wild Weasel, for that matter) have been shorter and stockier, looking more in the vein of the original figures than the JvC offerings. You can't really tell from the above shot, but check this one:
The new Barrel Roll is much shorter and in proportion with the classic style figures, which is cool. However, there are, of course, downsides to this new figure. Because of the BTR arms and legs, his swivel wrists are gone, which stinks. That was a great feature of the original, and would be welcome on this newer version. Also, the colors, while nice and dark, are quite duller on the new one than the old one. Instead of the cool blues, grays, and blacks, we have basically different shades of gray, which work for a night ops figure, but do look a little on the boring side.
All of this aside, though, I was downright shocked at how cool this new Barrel Roll figure was. Like with the Firefly, I immediately sawed off his BTR knobs and may or may not use him as my default Barrel Roll in the future. The nice thing is, his joints are a LOT tighter than the Wave 5 Barrel Roll, which makes him more usable to me in a dio-story capacity. He even looks cool in the Spy Troops getup:
So, all in all, I expected to get an okay vehicle with basically a figure to toss in my cabinet for completist reasons. Instead I got an okay vehicle with a pretty cool new rendition of one of my favorite new sculpt characters. Hasbro is making great strides with their BTR figures lately, and I really, REALLY hope that this is indicative of changes in scale to the upcoming line, as well as hoping that these new BTR molds make it into the production of regular figures as well. Time will well.
For eight bucks, this is definitely a figure/BTR set to pick up. It took me about ten minutes to carve off those obnoxious pegs, and in return I got a great night ops Barrel Roll figure to use...in my opinion, it's worth dropping the green, especially if you're a Barrel roll fan like I am.
The human jet! Okay...maybe not.