The very idea of it struck me as a very cynical cash-grab - not just on Hasbro's part, because orange was the signature colour selected by Lamborghini for the Aventador. Thus, we have this so-called 'Shadow Raider' - a non-character retconned into Age of Extinction as one of Lockdown's crew... Literally the only draw here (unless you're a big fan of orange) is a new head sculpt and one of Lockdown's missing weapons... though, sadly, not the massive head-gun that the original AoE toyline figure had. Neither of these really warranted forking out another £20+ in my opinion.
But, in a fit of caprice, I picked him up anyway... Seriously, sometimes I don't understand myself. But let's have a look...
Vehicle Mode:
Well, for starters, I don't know what possessed Lamborgini to choose orange as their Aventador brand colour. I've seen photos online of a sort of copper-chrome orange, and that looks OK, if exceedingly ostentatious... but this flat orange looks ridiculous. Admittedly, it wouldn't look out of place in a Fast & Furious sequel, but it's really not a flattering colour.
Worse still, it's not even applied consistently. There are differences in the opacity of the orange paint over the different types of plastic used for the car shell, sometimes to the extent that it looks as though a white undercoat was used on some parts but not others. Honestly, the right side 'door' looks to have been underpainted, the rear windscreen panel doesn't match the roof, both rear wheelwell panels are only painted on the outer surface, emphasising the transformation seams, and the orange paint on the windscreen/window frames appears to be translucent and the central section of the bonnet doesn't match the headlight sections. Elsewhere, the paint is thick and blotchy, filling in the sculpted detail as well as exhibiting lumps and bubbles.
Where it gets really weird is that the base plastic is essentially black - actually a brownish colour, far darker than the grey plastic Lockdown was molded in - yet the black in the front bumper area, the scoop sections on the sides, the rear bumper and the indented sections below the rear indicator lights are all glossy black paint. I think the rear windscreen may be an area of bare plastic, and the only significant difference is the lack of the glossy sheen. On the upside, the Lamborghini badge shape has been picked out in gold in the car's nose, and the tail lights are painted red, much the same as they were on Lockdown. The one and only improvement on the original iteration of this mold is the silver paint on the inside of the headlights, which Lockdown lacked.
Even the new accessory - singular this time, and so already disappointing compared to SS Lockdown's hook and knife - looks daft in this mode. It uses the same tab-in-slot method of attaching to the side doors but, due to its shape, can only attach facing forwards on the righthand side. It attaches perfectly well on the lefthand side, but only facing back. They're both fairly tight slots offering a firm mounting... but they're also very obvious due to lack of paint, and the black plastic gun looks pretty ridiculous mounted on the side of an orange Lamborghini Aventador, whichever way it's facing.
Definitely not one of my favourite toy vehicle modes, even though I love the vehicle... just goes to show what the wrong choice of colour can do. I could understand painting the car silver, or grey, even copper, to vaguely resemble the metallic orange version of the car... just about any other colour... but flat orange, for a character named 'Shadow Raider' just doesn't fit, and the mismatched paint really lowers the tone of this toy... Particularly in the light of the contrast it presents with robot mode....
Robot Mode:
...Because here's where it gets crazy. Shadow Raider's robot mode is mostly bare plastic - dark enough to look basically black, but there is a faintly pearlesecent brown tinge to some of it. There's only one application of orange specific to robot mode, and a couple of applications of flat grey paint on the chest and thighs. The grey paint is strange, as it appears to have a subtle and very fine metallic flake component... so why not just use silver or gunmetal paint? He even, bafflingly, has a black Decepticon insignia stamped onto the orange chest panel, seemingly as an attempt to disguise the unaltered 'scratch' details from the original mold.
The vast majority of the orange paint is relegated to the leftover vehicle shell panels, the majority of which end up on the back of the figure. Of course, the biceps remain orange because they're parts of the vehicle shell with robot detail folded out over the sides, and they present a very strange element to the robot's appearance... almost as if they're mistakenly left over from vehicle mode.
...Because the 'robot' CGI shown in brief glimpses in the movie really just looks like a cosplayer wearing a black scuba suit embellished with cardboard armour panels, LED details on the helmet and luminous paint splashed across the torso. It has Lockdown's feet, but is otherwise a much simplified model that clearly doesn't transform, at least, not into anything terrestrial. They don't have his arm-mounted shell clips, or his protruding collar, and are presented more as clones of each other than of Lockdown. Complex as he is, Lockdown's CGI includes references to his vehicle mode, not least the headlights slotted into his chest, none of which was visible on Lockdown's crew in the movie. All those details are still present in the sculpt, the the paintwork has been cut right down (largely, I suspect, due to the extensive use of orange on the vehicle shell) leaving a minimalist interpretation of minimalised CGI detail. And the problem with pairing a super-dark plastic colour for the robot mode with a super-bright orange for the vehicle is that the painted orange plastic can be seen through the small gaps in the robot's torso, at the top of the pop-out chest plate, let alone behind his collar.
The weapon accessory is reasonably well sculpted, albeit rather slimmer than I'd expected. It represents the arm-mounted handgun version of Lockdown's face cannon with its trio of laser sights, glimpsed ever so briefly near the start of the movie, before it transforms into a Spark Extractor with which he casually offs Ratchet. Given that he's never clearly seen using this weapon, I'm a little surprised they didn't go with the Spark Extractor form instead, or even the more simplistic handgun/rifle thing the Shadow Raiders seem to have carried in the movie... Still, it's a decent looking weapon, I just wish it'd had some green paint applied to the cartridges on the top. The way the gun is arranged, it can only attach to his right hand, with the stubby 5mm peg slotting into the fist and the wide tab at the bottom of the weapon slotting into an otherwise unused socket on the inside of the door panel on his forearm. Limiting though this may be, it fits very well on the right arm and blends into the forearm as well as can be expected with a massive orange panel on the outer face - definitely one of the more successful Studio Series weapons, even without decoration.
The new head, meanwhile, represents Lockdown with his visor deployed, rather than attempting to depict the actual Shadow Raider heads, which are more like something out of the Splinter Cell games, just with red lights (and more of them) rather than green. It's almost as if the plan was to release this as another version of Lockdown, but Hasbro realised that they couldn't saturate the line with Lockdowns the way it felt like they'd already started to do with Bumblebees and Optimus Primes. The back of the head appears to be identical to the original model, but the front is entirely new, cast in the same transparent, colourless plastic as the windscreen, windows and headlights, but then painted green on the reverse. The visor's frame is then painted with the same glossy black as the recessed panels of vehicle mode, so it presents a subtle contrast to the less glossy, vaguely metallic brown used elsewhere. It's a decent sculpt, but the whole point of the visor was that it obscured the most detailed aspects of Lockdown's face design, and covering what little detail there is - the tiny gears and pistons that control the myriad panels of the mask - with black paint does the sculpt a disservice. Sure, the glossiness means it picks up the light better than the bare plastic, but there could have been a few metallic highlights here and there, surely?
£20+ is certainly a lot to pay for one of SS Lockdown's missing accessories and an alternate head sculpt, and it certainly feels as though Hasbro could have added the extra head and weapon into the original package without damaging their profit margins. Given that Hasbro are not averse to releasing non-transforming action figures of their TransFormers characters, Shadow Raider could easily have been one of those - perhaps even should have been - if indeed it was required to appear in toy form at all. Bulking out the Studio Series line with unnecessary repaints, particularly garish monstrosities like this, might help them keep their licensors (such as Lamborghini) happy and more inclined to pursue future movie agreements, but what does Shadow Raider do, other than give us collectors an accessory set that isn't appreciably better than the sort of thing the Third Parties sometimes offer?
I can understand repaints like Stinger into KSI Sentry, even though that was technically the wrong car and might have been better as a reuse of the Dark of the Moon Que/Wheeljack mold. I find it frustrating enough when the movies turn a car of one colour into a robot in another, but to shoehorn a background non-entity from one of the movies into a vehicle with such a massively contrating colour looks awful.
Hasbro really needs to start looking into producing accessory sets to go with Studio Series, to supplement the cardboard mini dioramas and more fully kit out the figures... Even bits of scenery might be worth considering, so that collectors could set up displays without mixing-and-matching model kits, train sets and other sources, if that is their wont. It certainly couldn't be any worse a move than putting figures like this into the Studio Series line...
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