War for Cybertron: Kingdom Huffer

Most of my earliest TransFormers toys, back when the toyline first launched in the mid-1980s, were Mini Autobots bought with pocket money. I have a clear recollection of buying Cliffjumper first, then Windcharger, and then I'm pretty certain my third Autobot purchase was Huffer, because I found his Budiansky-authored character bio utterly delightful (what can I say, I was a weird and occasionally somewhat grumpy kid!).

So when Huffer was revealed as one of the new Mini Autobot recreations coming out in the Kingdom line, I was initially very much on board. After all, while WfC's new Deluxes tended to be on the small size, and Earthrise Cliffjumper is almost a perfect match for Scout class Reveal the Shield/TF United Windcharger, even if he does compare less favourably with the Legends class Mini Autobots from RtS or the Prime Wars Trilogy.

When the toy was actually revealed, however, I initially decided not to bother after all. Hasbro had essentially taken the engineering from an existing Third Party figure and cut it down to the bare bones, leaving the lower legs hollow and awkward flaps of plastic for feet, then sought to achieve the desired pricepoint by throwing in unnecessary accessories - specifically a riot shield and a shotgun. These were better suited to the concept of Siege than Earthrise and, even then, more appropriate to one of the few Autobot warriors than to a character who was - in the original G1, at least - a Construction Engineer. All of this turned Kingdom Huffer into an easy pass...

...Until I found myself with a £10 voucher which could be used at The Entertainer, amongst other stores. Lacking any other, more constructive use for such a voucher for the time being, I reluctantly spent it on acquiring what had appeared to be a fairly lacklustre figure. Could Kingdom Huffer turn out to be a pleasant surprise..?

Vehicle Mode:

There are aspects of this that I like, and aspects that I thoroughly dislike. Dealing with the latter first, the back end is completely open, revealing the robot's thighs from the knee. This may be nothing new, but it looks particularly ugly coupled with Huffer's other issues. The tail lights are on boxes protruding out to the sides to allow clearance for the thighs during transformation. The robot's fists are simply folded down behind the cab with nothing to disguise them or in any way distract from the fact that this truck has fists hanging off its ridiculously oversized smoke stacks. The trailer hitch plate can be folded up in front of the fists, but then you're forgoing the utility of the trailer hitch. The smokestacks are mounted on plates that hinge out from the sides just behind the front wheels, such that there's precious little clearance for the wheels to spin. Worst of all, due to plastic tolerance issues in some of the transformation joints, the cab ends up at a slight angle, made all the more distracting by the apparent angle at the back end, making it look as though he's bent in the middle.

What I like about vehicle mode is that they bothered to paint the majority of his smoke stacks silver and the cab is fairly well decorated. This included the use of translucent blue plastic for all the windows, which then protrudes through the roof into the two roof-mounted lights. The sculpting of the cab is excellent, with even such fine details as door handles, windscreen wipers and indicator lights (though the latter are unpainted). The sculpting of the trailer hitch is pretty reasonable, and surrounded by faux diamond plate (also, sadly, unpainted). Just for a change, they even painted the rear indicator lights though, as usual, the only colour used is red.

The problem here is that Huffer is a small, orange truck that doesn't scale particularly well with his own size class, let alone with larger figures. OK, so far, so G1 - many of the Mini Autobots didn't scale well with each other - but shouldn't we be expecting something a little better in this day and age? He looks plain daft when placed alongside Earthrise Cliffjumper, and looks only marginally better with older figures like Titans Return Brawn or Generations Tailgate and Swerve.

I'm very much in two minds about Huffer's accessories in vehicle mode. The claws of the riot shield hang down the back of the vehicle doing very little to conceal the openings to the robot's knees, while the unpainted insides of the shotgun halves make for a very irregular and unconvincing pair of walls for what is essentially a pickup truck bed. The inner faces of these weapon parts features molded hatching that appears to represent emergency striping but, without supporting paintwork, it fails to convince. Additionally, if these accessories are intended to turn Huffer into a pickup... shouldn't the claws be standing upward rather than drooping down? How's anything supposed to stay on the truck bed when he starts moving? It feels as though the designer of this toy doesn't really understand trucks or pickups, and just sort of conflated them for convenience, resulting in a cheap and lazy looking alternate vehicle mode.

Aside from the accessories packaged with him, Huffer has eleven hexagonal C.O.M.B.A.T. ports dotted about his vehicle mode, though two are bordering on inaccessible, and four others become so when his own accessories are attached. Additionally, since his fists are just flapped down behind the cab, they can be treated as another two ports for accessories, making the grand total thirteen. I'm not entirely sure why the back end has three ports surrounding the trailer hitch, and it strikes me that they could simply have moved the sculpted detail for the trailer hitch further back and dropped the port in the middle. With all these ports, it's obviously easy to attach Huffer's accessories in alternate configurations - such as the old favourite, the roof-mounted shotgun - but I generally prefer the look of the vehicle with no accessories plugged in.

Much has been made of Huffer's compatibility with Earthrise Optimus Prime's trailer and, honestly, he ends up being at a (very slightly) better scale to that otherwise pointless accessory than the figure originally packaged with it. The trailer shell looks to be about the perfect size, comparatively, but it - and Huffer's back end - are just raised too high due to the necessities of the robot mode. Even that wouldn't look so bad if the cab shell was slightly taller. While attaching Huffer's accessories prevents his use of Prime's trailer, there is a way to store his accessories on the trailer. Obviously there's no shortage of 5mm ports inside, and a couple on the outside, but the shield can be wedged between the trailer's wheels and the shotgun parts can be plugged in to the undersides of the trailer to represent fenders. Neither are particularly stable, though, with the former being a balancing act and the latter each relying on only half of a 5mm peg. They're also a bit conspicuous in orange, but they actually help the trailer look a bit more natural in my eyes, since they occupy some of what is otherwise an excessively vast open space between the rear of the truck and the trailer's wheels.

Robot Mode:

From the moment I first saw Kingdom Huffer, there was something familiar about him... And no surprise, considering how many Third Party companies have produced their own lines of G1 Mini Autobot remakes, some of which looked quite similar to each other. Hasbro's designers appear to have cherry-picked elements from these and distilled them down to fit their current lowest common denominator engineering - hence the hollow lower legs - while throwing in unnecessary elements like the riot shield and shotgun. However, while there are similarities to these Third Party figures, this toy's design appears to remarkably similar to concept art published in the TransFormers Generations 2011 catalogues, labelled as being a Masterpiece, with the main differences being the way the hands and front wheels are dealt with, and the absence of the trailer hitch plate doubling as the soles of the robot's feet.

I think the main reason I've ended up having a bit of a downer on this figure is that it's so clearly based on the animation model in terms of its styling and colourscheme. Some folks might really like that but, as someone who owns - and still really likes - the G1 toy, I prefer the darker blue and more extensive sculpted detail of the torso, the clawed hands and the largely featureless 'battlemask' face.

But when I say the diminutive precursor has more extensive sculpted detail, that's not to say Kingdom Huffer is lacking in that department, just that what detail he has is conspicuously reduced compared to other figures in the line, and that the choice of pale purple as the secondary (paint) colour on the torso flattens it out further. Admittedly, I don't have large number of War for Cybertron toys for comparison, but Huffer looks particularly bland when viewed with the full range... and that's all the fault of the G1 cartoon. His arms are basically just silver-painted cylinders with the exhaust ports on his wrists, his chest has only the most shallowly-sculpted detailing and, while the groin area has been sculpted in reference to one of the detail stickers from the G1 toy, it's been coated in silver paint alone, so it looks pretty dull. The legs have a largely square cross-section with only a little bit of detailing in the form of raised panels and linework, while the lower legs are enormous, boxy, knee-length Robo-Ugg boots with cloven feet and utterly hollow calves. There's very little to truly engage the eye aside from the Autobot insignia on his chest.

Now, as someone who started collecting TransFormers back in 1984, Huffer - to me - is the "cynical, hard-boiled and pessimistic" Autobot Construction Engineer... So the fact that he's packaged with a shotgun and a riot shield really makes zero sense. It might have worked for a line line Siege, where the war on Cybertron is in full swing and someone like Huffer might have been a reluctant conscript, but it highlights the narrative incoherence of the War for Cybertron Trilogy and makes an absolute mockery of the sterling work put in by Bob Budiansky all those years ago. On the upside, both weapons look quite good - the coating of dark gunmetal paint on the well-sculpted gun in particular - but the claws on the shield are a bit of a strange aesthetic choice. There's a sense that they'd be great accessories for someone - maybe one of the few Autobot brawlers - but they're definitely not suited to Huffer.

As mentioned, I'm really not a fan of cartoon-style head sculpts, so this one is just dull in my opinion. It's a very basic, bland, humanoid face in a bucket-like helmet. It features a bold, shallow mohawk-style crest that extends from the forehead to about halfway down the back of the head, and the sides feature perfunctory panel lining. However, where the animation model at least paid small homage to the toy's visor by giving Huffer grey panda-eyes, this one has no framing for his beady, recessed metallic blue eyes.

Huffer's transformation is really nothing spectacular. The cab is on a double hinge, and uses that to simply concertina into place and, functionally speaking, there's precious little difference between its final resting position in either mode. The front wheels collapse into the body after hinging the entire upper torso forward - like an ab crunch, only it separates the majority of his otherwise empty torso from the back plate to which the cab 'hoodie' is attached. His shoulders then flip up to occupy the spaces vacated by the wheels on each side, rotating at the bicep to get the elbow into the correct position, and the fists flip out at the wrists. The legs then just unpeg from his backside and straighten at the knee, with the trailer hitch plate flipping round to form the soles of his feet. The legs can then be separated and the robot stood up. I've found there are clearance issues transforming the arms and front wheels into either mode, but the main problem seems to be that the vehicle mode back end tabs in at an angle, giving the truck its sagging/bent-in-the-middle appearance.

As can be expected with this line of TransFormers, articulation is broadly pretty good. The hood can get in the way of shoulder rotation if it's sat in its lowest position, tightest to the back, but it keeps to a slightly raised position perfectly well, or it can be simply hinged back a touch, to give the shoulders their full 360° range. The biceps rotate as part of transformation, so they're completely unhindered, the elbows manage a fraction under 90° of bend thanks to the sculping of the upper part of the joint, and the hands can only bend inward at the wrist for transformation. The head appears to be on a ball joint, but its movement is restricted, offering very little more than 360° rotation, which is also an optional step in transformation, since the head ends up on the underside of vehicle mode. Separating the front of the torso from the back enables an ab crunch, and he has full waist rotation despite it not being necessary for transformation. The legs can swing forward/back with a full range of about 180° (slightly less than 90° forward, slightly more back), the knees are transformation joints, allowing the lower leg to fold completely back over the thigh, and only slightly restricted by the presence of the grey plate as the sole of the foot. The actual knee joint is strangely low behind the shin, so the legs start to look quite weird with the knees bent. Curiously, while the ankles are hinged to tilt inward, their range is surprisingly limited, though I can't see why and, given the absurd range on some of the other figures in the line, it seems strange that they'd deliberately limit this one.

This may be faint praise but, in spite of my initial disappointment when images of Huffer were first revealed, I don't dislike the figure as much as I thought I would. While it's not the most impressive TransFormers toy to come out of the War for Cybertron Trilogy, it's... adequate. It hits enough of the right nostalgic notes to be a decent addition to my set of Generations Mini Autobots, and I kind of now regret not acquiring the Gears retooling of Generations Swerve, since he's now the only character from the 1984 Minibot line-up that I don't have represented in the contemporary set. The problem is, while this Huffer is certainly a more faithful adaptation than the repaints of Optimus Prime or Trailbreaker that have popped up in the smaller size classes in recent years, it feels like a figure that probably should have come out about ten to fifteen years ago. I might well have raved about it in the early 2000s, but as a figure in the 2020s, it feels like it could have been done better. Ultimately, it's Hasbro's continued laser focus on recreating Generation 1 based solely on the terrible cartoon that lets this figure down, since I might have enjoyed the figure more if it had the original toy's head sculpt and clawed hands.

Making matters all the more insulting, a G1 toy-style head sculpt does exist for this mold... but they're only using it for the Generations Road Ranger release - a toy based upon a Go-Bot (or, more specifically, Takara Tomy's Encore set of G1 Mini Autobots repainted as Go-Bots after they bought the rights to the line from Bandai). Given that Hasbro releases toys with alternate heads in some of their other toylines - such as Marvel Legends and GI Joe - and that they're no stranger to detachable heads on TransFormers - going to far as to include a HeadMaster gimmick on their Nitro Zeus figure even though that feature was cut from the movie - one would think they'd have considered including toy-accurate alternate heads with some of their G1 reboot figures, as opposed to these daft weapon accessories that aren't even character-appropriate.... Yet the closest we've come so far was the separate release of alternate versions of some of the G1 HeadMasters released individually before a full toy was made, or the set of slightly recoloured versions released by Takara Tomy under the TransFormers Legends banner.

So, there you go Hasbro: next time you want to do yet another fucking G1 reboot, follow the examples of your toylines based around humanoids. Give us animation accurate heads for those that liked the 1980s TransFormers cartoon, and toy-accurate heads for those that think the toys looked far better. And if you're not going to publish altered character bios, and insist on bulking up to a particular price point with accessories, at least try to give us accessories that are appropriate to the character.

It's figures like Huffer that highlight for me what an absolute waste of a toyline Kingdom is. They couldn't commit fully to either G1 styling or Beast Wars, even in the latter's 25th Anniversary year, and the appalling TV series presented by Netflix doesn't feature any of the newly-introduced toy characters from the G1 side. The engineering is outdated, the presentation is both bland and cheap, and it makes me question my desire to own any of the other figures coming out.