I only really looked into the G1 toy once I got back into TransFormers in the early/mid-2000s, and discovered that it was actually a bit shit. Nevertheless, while it never quite made it onto my list of 'Holy Grail' TransFormers toys, even after the less than stellar attempt at an update by the Collectors' Club, based on the Classics Sunstreaker/Sideswipe mold, I was quite keen to get hold of one...
...Until, that is, the Power of the Primes version was announced. Sporting a sleeker vehicle mode and a Combiner Wars-style transformation (minus the combiner peg, thankfully), and coming as an Amazon exclusive boxed set with the Prime Master 'Prima Prime', this seemed like a better use of my money than acquiring the G1 Doublespy which, complete and in good condition, can command silly money on the secondary market. Since I'm still awaiting any news from Amazon on their supposed Prime Day exclusive PotP Nemesis Prime, I ordered this from In Demand Toys for £35 - cheaper than a Deluxe class toy from the Club, certainly... but still somewhat inflated for a Deluxe. Is it worth that?
Packaging:
Hasbro's special edition packaging has certainly improved since the Titans Return sets that essentially had to be destroyed to access the toys inside. This is more like an upgrade to the Studio Series style of box... or a more eyecatching/less subdued version of the black-boxed 'Special Edition' Universe figures released in 2008. It features some awesome character art on the front flap, surrounded by raised, Spot-UV varnished TransFormers branding and Prime Wars livery. The left side features a section of a larger image which, I assume, would feature all of the special edition characters once completed - I'm sure I can see part of Repugnus' forearm on there. The right side features all the Prime Master icons, and the back looks like the same template you'd see on a card-backed Deluxe. It's really nicely done, so I'll likely hang on to this box (for a while, at least).
Opening the flap reveals the robot in Punch mode, his handgun and Prima Prime in a large display window, along with a brief summary of the Power of the Primes story on the inner face of the flap. It's printed in English, French, Spanish and Italian, and runs to four or five lines depending on the language. My box also has a sticker tagged onto the back, revealing its Chinese origin and possibly explaining the price tag - import costs were added by the vendor.
Vehicle Mode:
While the G1 toy looked like an awkward cross between a generic, boxy sedan and a pickup (supposedly it's meant to be based on the Pontiac Fiero - not one of Pontiac's finest creations) but this thing looks like a single, intentionally designed vehcile, kind of like a Porsche Panamera, but with the front end that's a blend of a 2017 Corvette Stingray and the 2016 Camaro - the curves of the former, with the bonnet venting and headlights of the latter. It's a much sleeker car than the G1 car, curvier, and with a surprisingly low roof. The size of the wheels seems exaggerated, but it doesn't look ridiculous, just sort of emphasises the sense that this is a powerful vehicle.
The front end is pretty mean-looking, nicely detailed and reasonably well decorated. The headlights are separate pieces of colourless, transparent plastic, sculpted with ridges that are very reminiscent of the 2016 Camaro, particularly in the overall shape. The central, v-shaped grille is simply sculpted and rather inconsistendly painted - the outer sides are framed with silver paint, while the central section only has silver paint on the bottom of the frame. The lower grille is similarly glitchy, with the outer parts painted wholly within its frame, but the central part featuring silver paint on the bottom of the frame itself. There's additional silver paint on the front wings, but the indicator lights are unpainted.
At the back of the car, the rear indicators are painted red while a small, sculpted rear window is painted silver. The only other paintwork is the red on the hubcaps, so it's a fairly basic paint job overall - no fancy detailing, patterns, and the back end kept as simple as the average contemporary Deluxe. I'm kind of hoping Reprolabels come up with an upgrade set as, much as I like the vehicle mode, it really does deserve a bit more decoration.
The front and side windows are clear, colourless plastic, but the framework is all solid blue plastic with the windows attached within. The upside to the use of transparent plastic is that it looks nice and clean... the not insignificant downside is that it reveals Counterpunch's faux-canopy chest within.
The roof of the car features a 5mm port, which can accommodate either the Prime Armour or the handgun. Disappointingly, it appears to be the same 'booster/jetpack' mold as the Prime Armour supplied with all the PotP Deluxe Autobots I own, with one other design seemingly common to all the PotP Deluxe Decepticons and another common to the Dinobots and Terrorcons. It's molded in a very dark gunmetal/charcoal coloured plastic - the same used for the vehicle's tyres - with a clear, colourless cover for the Prime Master slot.
While the handgun can be pegged into the roof - or into the thumb sockets of the Prime Armour when that's mounted on the roof - there's a specific tab for it on the underside of the car to keep it out of sight. It attaches via a slot in the grip, so it protrudes no lower than the robot's chest.
Punch Mode:
The Autobot identity of this robot is a bit of a curiosity, in that he goes from being an entirely blue car (albeit with red hubcaps) to a blue and orange robot... and there's quite a lot of orange to spring out of nowhere - most of his upper body, in fact. This sort of colour shift is, of course, nothing unusual in the TransFormers franchise, but it was only with the later, post-Diaclone G1 figures that it really became common. In this sense, Prime Wars Punch is fairly typical of the late-G1 Autobot style - a chunky 'bot in bright, friendly colours.
His chest features a small amount of tech/armour detailing, most of which directly references similar details on the G1 toy, but it's laid out in better proportion than the G1 original, which seems to have had a torso slightly wider than it was tall. There are three defined levels to the chest - the widest part at the top, a lower ridge with a gap in the middle, then the waist is the slimmest and flattest part. The level of sculpted detail also increases from the chest to the belly. Chunks of the car's front wings remain on Punch's shoulders and, while they are handled less clumsily than the G1 version, having all the joints and structural parts on show doesn't look especially tidy. Tempting though it may be to think there must have been a better way to deal with it, it does have to work for two different configurations so the options were pretty limited. It's certainly no worse than the knees, which have large open spaces below them so they can bend both ways.
Punch gets the lion's share of the robot-specific paint, I think, with an his Autobot insignia stamped over a silver box, just above a small, black tech detail tampograph on his chest flap, as well as red and silver panels on his thighs. The bulk of the thighs are painted a dark gunmetal/charcoal colour, closely matching the dark plastic, just a little glossier. All of this, on balance, still doesn't amount to a great deal of paintwork, and the robot still looks quite plain. The weird thing is that the G1 toy had stickers on top and on the outside of the shoulder chunks but, since this version handles the car parts (a little) better, there's really nowhere to decorate any further. That said, I'm sure Reprolabels will come up with something...
The overall look of this robot is pretty good but, in this day and age, I'm inclined to object to Deluxe class TransFormers toys that don't have feet. It became a feature in Combiner Wars to facilitate the sort of simple transformation required to turn certain vehicles into both robots and limbs of the gestalts, but most of those Deluxes at least had the implication of feet as sculpted detail. Punch just uses the flat car roof as feet. Given the way parts of the car's canopy fold up into the shins, I can't see any simple way to add feet, but it still feels like a huge step backward in terms of toy design.
Where the G1 toy came packaged with two weapons - one for each robot - the Prime Wars version has one handgun and one Prime Armour/Combiner hand. The handgun isn't based on either of the weapons supplied with the G1 toy - if anything, it looks more like one of Generations/Legends Arcee's pistols, but cast in orange plastic. It even has a similar rectangular grip, despite the 5mm circular grip in the robot's hands. It looks OK, but Punch's orange handgun should have been a double-barreled weapon, and they could easily have recycled the gun packaged with Combiner Wars Air Raid/Skydive for this purpose. The Prime Armour can attach to Punch's chest via a 5mm socket behind his chest flap, or it can be plugged into his back as a jetpack. Like all Prime Armour, it's not remotely convincing - it sticks out too far and sits a little too low on his chest... but at least the shimmery, charcoal-coloured plastic looks OK. Of course, the Prime Master socket cover can be used as a second pistol but, being cast in transparent plastic, it looks a bit daft as a handgun.
The head sculpt is a better-proportioned remake of the G1 original - very much based on the toy rather than the animation model, thankfully. This gives him an Optimus Prime-like vibe, with a mouthplate, separate eyes, and a helmet with a central crest and antennae on either side. Naturally, without a face to speak of, it's quite a simplistic sculpt, but very effective, and both the colourscheme and the mobile helmet remind me a little of Superlink Roadbuster/Energon Ironhide. The colour of the helmet does seem a little out of place but it's all very G1 accurate, but the main problem is that it doesn't clip into place in either position, and moving his head around often shifts the helmet back down in front of Punch's eyes.
Counterpunch Mode:
Counterpunch's robot mode is far more sober than Punch's - he's almost entirely one colour, with only a handful of touches of charcoal and metallic purple paint specific to robot mode and all other colour coming from the vehicle mode chunks on his shoulders. His chest it boxier, being a G1-referencial faux-car roof, complete with windscreen, side windows and minor tech detailing within. Most of the chest is a single piece of tranparent plastic painted over with blue, but the central panel - displaying his Decepticon insignia inside a silver box - is opaque blue plastic.
Behind this flap is the 5mm port that accommodates the Prime Armour... and it's a lot lower down on Counterpunch than it was on Punch, meaning it's another one that ends up looking like a robo-pregnancy simulator rather than practical armour. Alternatively, it can be plugged into his back to further disguise Punch (because pulling his chest flap down to hide his Autobot insignia doesn't change his appearance a great deal) and act as a jet pack. The thumbs have less impact on his arms range of motion than they do when plugged into Punch's back, but more of an impact on Counterpunch when plugged into his chest. The peg is also a much tighter fit. Personally, I tend to plug the Prime Armour into a fist as an oversized handgun, since it sort of resembles a double-barrelled hand cannon (if you squint), and this means that, if Punch is stuck with a single-barrelled gun, Counterpunch can have the double-barrelled weapon in this incarnation - thus, this figure does have two weapons... albeit with their colourschemes, and thereby their intended users, switched versus the G1 original.
Unlike the G1 toy, Counterpunch uses the same arms as Punch, just with the red hands substituted for blue by means of a rotation joint in the wrist. Curiously, the hands are molded in orange plastic and painted red for Punch and blue for Counterpunch. One might think they weren't confident of using the red paint on the blue plastic, but the same paint has been applied to the wheels, so it should have worked well enough. Nevertheless, this is a clever usage of a joint which might otherwise be used to simply conceal the hands for vehicle mode. One odd thing about Counterpunch's hands is that they're sculpted fully closed, where Punch's have space between his thumbs and fingers. It makes little to no difference to his grip, largely due to both being 5mm diameter sockets while his orange handgun has a rectangular grip.
Carrying on the reversed reuse of Punch's bodyparts, Counterpunch at least has perfunctory, sculpted and painted feet, but they're miniscule even compared to the sort of thing that turned up on Combiner Wars figures, and the gaps below his knees are every bit as noticeable. The metallic purple panels on his shins refer to stickers on the G1 toy, but the detailing is a little different, and the stickers features silver framing and a small green block at the top - again, this could be a job for Reprolabels.
The head sculpt, naturally, is just the back of Counterpunch's head so, again, it's a more natural-looking size and it's an upgrade on the G1 toy, albeit perhaps with a bit more reference to the animation model, in that he has a defined mouth - upper and lower lips have been sculpted - on the exposed part of his face, though only the lower lip and chin are actually painted silver. His eyes are painted red rather than silver - complementing Punch's blue eyes - and, while the sculpt suggests a visor like on the G1 toy, the paint has been applied as two separate strips of red. It's an appropriately sinister head sculpt, but affected by the same helmet-drooping issue.
Despite not featuring a combiner peg, Punch-Counterpunch has a very Combiner Wars-style transformation - the front of the car splits and pulls the arms out from the torso, while the legs just unfold from the back of the car and the central part of the bonnet folds down into the torso. The big difference is that the front end of the car is connected to the shoulders via an articulated arm that allows it to switch position between Punch and Counterpunch. It's that simplicity that allows the two robot modes, but it also means this is technically less complicated than the G1 version, which had unique arms for each robot mode, not just a different position for the shoulder armour. Transforming him back to vehicle mode on one occasion, I applied a touch too much force straightening out the central part of the bonnet, and caused the faux windscreen on Counterpunch's chest to crack slightly on one side. It's not terrible - took me quite a while to notice, to be honest - but I'll have to handle him with a bit more care in future, as I don't want to make it worse!
If this toy's transformation is comparatively simplistic, the only real downside to its articulation is the lack of feet. Punch's lower legs are the top of the back end of the car, Counterpunch's are the underside of the back of the car. The former has no defined feet, while the latter has a couple of barely raised areas at the very bottom of his lower legs, painted dark gunmetal/charcoal. Not only do I find both hugely disappointing, it impacts on his stability. Granted, there's not a lot of space on the inside of the vehicle mode to accommodate separately poseable feet for one or the other, let alone both, but what they've done really feels like a cop-out. Everything else is about average - ball-jointed hips with upper thigh rotation via a mushroom peg, ball-jointed shoulders on hinges, ball-jointed neck (barely), and then double-jointed elbows and knees - giving him a range of movement every bit as good as any other Deluxe... just without a decent, adaptable footprint for dramatic posing. One small thing I find quite impressive is that the waist articulation is not hindered in any way, in either robot mode, by the opening the flap on the back to conceal whichever faction insignia is not required.
Given the choice of buying the G1 original, the Collectors' Club/Timelines version or this update for the same price, I'd go with this version every time. It feels like a toy that was intended for the Generations line before it rebooted into Combiner Wars, except that, had it been designed at any point in the Classics/Universe/Generations/30th Anniversary cycle, it may have been a bit more intricate. The Club's version wasn't bad, and basing it on the Sunstreaker/Sideswipe mold was a good choice, since it had been deliberately designed with both characters in mind. It was only let down by feet that were only intended for use in one specific configuration of the lower leg, and the Club's insistence on fudging an alternate leg configuration for Punch. This version, having been designed from the ground up to be the old G1 Doublespy, is vastly more successful but, in its own way, just as underachieving now as the G1 toy was back in 1987. Ultimately, while this is packaged as part of the Prime Wars series, I'm more inclined to display him among my Classics figures, since he seems a better fit there. He has no direct interaction with Titan Masters or Prime Masters, and has no limb mode to tie him into either Combiner Wars or Power of the Primes.
Prima Prime:
It occurs to me that this is actually the first Prime Master I'm writing about, since they're sold separately or packaged with larger toys... I actually do have all eight of the individual Prime Masters, but haven't bothered posting them yet... I may just do a round-up of all of them, or perhaps group them into their waves...
Prime Masters are basically Titan Master figures with strange, esoteric designs on their backs instead of large robot faces. Prima Prime uses the same body as Solus Prime, packaged with the Octopunch Pretender/Decoy armour, but in a metallic grey and translucent cyan colourscheme, with silver paint added to the arms and head.
His Prime Core mode looks a bit of an indistinct jumble in translucent plastic, but kind of resembles a Power Rangers monster-of-the-week with exaggerated heart-shaped eyes. Prima Prime is supposedly 'the first transformer' and the leader of the Primes (hence the tautology of his name, I guess), so it makes a kind of sense to partner him with a character who has two robot modes, and I quite like the colourscheme, but I would have preferred two character-appropriate handguns rather than a random Prime Master without any Pretender/Decoy armour, particularly as the options for interacting with Punch-Counterpunch are so limited...
On Amazon.com, this figure is only $24.99 (just over £19), but with the equivalent of about £10 in shipping to the UK. If this ever gets an official UK release via Amazon, I'd imaging it'll be at least £25, just because an average Deluxe is approximately £20-£22 these days. I wouldn't say Punch-Counterpunch feels overpriced, exactly, but there's not a great deal of bang for one's buck, even taking the included Prime Master into account. What really lets it down, though, is the fact that it's misassembled and has to be 'fixed' straight out of the packaging to ensure it transforms properly. I applied the fix (basically, popping open the chest to remove the shoulder joints, and flipping them round so that the flat edge is facing up in robot mode - tutorials are widely available online) straight away, without even trying to transform him, and I'm baffled by how this wasn't picked up quickly by the factory's Quality Control. Then again, this is hardly the first TransFormers toy to be misassembled and, with Hasbro aiming to cut their costs ever lower, it certainly won't be the last.
Essentially, I'm happy with Prime Wars Punch-Counterpunch - it does what I wanted out of an update for the figure, and quells my desire for a G1 toy which is, objectively, a bit crap. This version does a far better job with the concept of a Doublespy, and - for the moment, at least - can be acquired more cheaply than either the G1 original or the deeply flawed Timelines version. If it's something you're interested in, I'd advise ordering it as soon as possible - given the situation with PotP Nemesis Prime on Amazon, I wouldn't expect Punch-Counterpunch to be any more likely to make an official appearance in the UK.
One final note: it occurs to me that, with a couple of minor(?) modifications to the way the shoulders work, this could be turned into a serviceable Nightbeat/Minerva... Except, of course, it's too late for that: HeadMasters were in the Titans Return toyline from 2016-17... I could imagine the Collectors' Club turning it into one or the other with just a new head sculpt and a character-specific paint job on the Punch chest, but the chances of either in the absence of the Club are beyond slim.
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