Considering its humbly-priced and thoroughly impressive beginnings, the Masterpiece line has grown to become - in my opinion - one of the most egregiously overpriced lines in the TransFormers franchise. This is particularly notable in the Masterpiece Movie subline where, at first glance, many of the figures appear to be only small upgrades on the quality of Leader Class toys circa Revenge of the Fallen.
Such was my opinion, at least, when MPM-13 Blackout emerged four years after the excellent Studio Series figure looking similarly underpainted and, in some ways, substantially less accurate, while MPM-4 Optimus Prime, which appeared a full eight years after the Leader class RotF toy, was marred by ill-fitting parts that didn't sit flush until the improved knockoffs appeared some time later. Similarly, having bought Studio Series Bonecrusher, I sold off my original Deluxe class toy, and the prospect of what looked like a sorely underpainted 'Masterpiece' enlargement just didn't appeal.
So, why do I have this now? Well, there are two reasons. First and foremost, MPM-15 Brawl appeared, looking like a substantial improvement on the rather cool Leader class toy from 2007, which got lost by the courier when I tried to sell it on a few years ago, and I was keen to get some form of replacement for him (albeit possibly a KO because, however good it is, it ain't worth £165!), since that had been the only version of movie Brawl I'd bought. This was enough to somewhat rekindle my interest in MPM, generally. Secondly... Game started selling Bonecrusher at half price sometime last year, and still had it in stock when, having started a new full-time job toward the end of January, my first full-month's paycheck arrived in my bank account at the end of February.
So, does slashing the price by half make this a worthwhile purchase? Stick with me, gentle reader, and we'll find out.
Packaging:
It would appear that I've been remiss in documenting the boxes that the MPM series figures come in... Which is strange, considering I'm actually quite fond of them. They're pretty minimalist - black backgrounds, white frames, and photographs of the toy on all sides rather than CGI or concept art. It features the standard red TransFormers logo branding and the 2007 movie's logo, and does a pretty good job of showing off its contents despite having no windows. Curiously, the images on the packaging make Bonecrusher look greener than I'd have expected... but whether that's a print issue or something wrong with the artwork, I can't be sure.
Inside is quite different to what I'm used to with the Masterpiece lines, but very much in line with Hasbro's current sensibilities: he's tethered to a fully-cardboard interior, with his accessories wrapped in tissue paper inside a box of their own, and with Hasbro's standard muddy, two-colour print instructions on rough, but substantial uncoated paper. Given the arrangement of the contents, the box is somewhat oversized: you could probably fit two copies of Bonecrusher in vehicle mode, potentially along with two sets of his accessories. Even so, the figure itself was substantially larger and weightier than I'd expected.
Vehicle Mode:
If there’s one thing I absolutely loathe, and which has absolutely no place on a good TransFormers toy, it’s beige. Beige is a colour that doesn’t want to commit to anything other than blandness. It’s neither a true off-white, nor a desaturated yellow, nor a pale brown, it’s just ‘meh’. In theory, I’d imagine Bonecrusher is meant to be a sort of sandy, ‘desert camouflage’ colour but he’s always cast in offensively inoffensive shades of beige (albeit with a weird, greenish colour added to the original Deluxe class toy). Thus, I was disappointed – but not at all surprised – to find that MPM Bonecrusher was cast mostly in beige plastic, with matching beige paint for the handful of translucent plastic windows and die cast parts.
What’s most frustrating about this, and particularly because this is a Masterpiece figure, is that there’s precious little paintwork detailing. This is a vehicle that’s not intended to look pristine and yet, aside from a few brown smudges – mostly reserved for the robot mode parts inevitably visible in vehicle mode – this is the cleanest Buffalo MPCV (Mine Protected Clearance Vehicle, also referred to as a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle) you’re ever likely to see. While screen-accurate, the black mudflaps are quite incongruous, but all kinds of other details, most notably the ladder on the back end of the vehicle and the forks of his mine-clearing arm, are bare beige plastic. Finer details, such as the cables and pistons of the arm are also unpainted beige plastic, which just seems to show how far Masterpiece has fallen since its inception.
That said, Bonecrusher is not wholly without small applications of detail paint. The vehicle’s small headlights are picked out with a silver/pearlescent paint, while the taillights and the indicators – including those mounted on the mudflaps, front and rear – are all painted. The wheels feature both weathering on the tyres and fully painted hubcaps. There’s even painted ‘road dust’ on the windscreen, though it's absent from every other window. The absence of weathering is baffling, but the lack of paint on the claw arm, picking out details like the remote camera, contributed significantly to my negative first impressions of this figure. It looked more like a Leader class toy than what I would call a ‘Masterpiece’, especially compared to earlier Masterpiece figures like Jazz. Just a simple black wash over all the vehicle parts could have worked wonders.
On the upside – and unlike the otherwise excellent Studio Series toy – this one does feature the bulldog decal from the movie vehicle, and it’s a tampographed design rather than a sticker, so much cleaner, more detailed and, with any luck, more durable than the 2007 Deluxe class toy.
The overall appearance of the Buffalo in terms of sculpted details is good, though there are obvious robot parts hanging off the undercarriage in the midsection, and this reduces vehicle mode’s ground clearance to barely a couple of millimetres in some places. For a figure based on a vehicle whose main selling points include a greater than average distance between the ground (and the mines potentially concealed therein) and the body of the vehicle, that's something of an oversight. Another oddity, common to all of the official versions Hasbro have released, is that the vehicle is wider that it should have been, a fact made most obvious by two features. The proportions of the windscreen are off – it's far wider than it needed to be for its height – and the ladder at the back is off to one side, where it's centred on the real-life vehicle, and it's narrower that it should be. Considering how it stows in robot mode, I'd have thought it could have been split evenly across both sides, but I'd guess there's some reason for it other than simply staying true to Hasbro's previous toys.
Some other features, such as the exhaust pipe on one side, would not only benefit by having some paint, but might have worked better as shallower sculpted detail on the side panel of the vehicle rather than being separate… but more on that when I get onto transformation. One really cute feature is the marking/branding on the tyres, which includes a Decepticon insignia, the name ‘Megatron’, and some tiny lettering. I do rather wish the tyres had been separate, rubber parts fitted over solid plastic wheels, rather than the hollow plastic shells they are – again, from my point of view, details like this detract from the idea of a ‘Masterpiece’ and make it look and feel more like a Leader class toy – but at least their hollowness isn’t immediately apparent… in this mode, at least.
The fork arm is fairly well articulated but feels perhaps a little overlong. Certainly, the second ratchet joint wasn't strong enough to support the rest of it before I opened it up and added a small wedge behind the pawl. Granted, that's a plastic tolerance issue for the most part, but it's also something of a design flaw. The real-world vehicle has an extending section to its arm which is lacking here… but I would concede that adding such a feature could have made it flimsier as well as causing additional complications for both transformation and robot mode articulation. The arm can rotate at its base, then has a couple of ratchet joints, a joint that allows the fork to rotate around its axis, then the fork itself is hinged at the base, and split into six independently articulated sets of blades. Considering the far-from-humble beginnings of the Masterpiece line included
wholly unnecessary functional pistons on the elbows, knees and ankles,
the fact that the couple of visible pistons on Bonecrusher's fork arm
are mere sculpted details is further proof of how extensively diminished this formerly
premium line has become. Considering the Bayverse CGI robots are known for being almost excessively complex, with all kinds of small moving parts, something as obvious as the pistons should have been made functional, and the cabling should have been separate, flexible threads. Aside from this, and the complete absence of paintwork, the arm is marred by the black screws visible on one side, and by the rather weak clip that holds it together halfway up the second segment. The clip was necessitated by the – mostly sensible – decision to package the bulk of the arm separately rather than having it attached to the vehicle inside the box. Unfortunately, the nearby ratchet joints are rather firmer than the clip’s connection, so it’s all too easy to detach the arm when simply trying to swing it around an pose it.
Robot Mode:
The prevalence of beige continues in robot mode, though it is at least broken up with a few applications of ‘weathering’ on the legs and torso. However, these are inconsistent and end up making it look either unfinished, or just plain half-arsed. The shins, groin, chest, shoulders, face, and the little spheres sticking out below his shoulders all feature some orange/brown ‘dirt’ applications, while silver/gunmetal paint has been applied to the thighs – at the bottom of the ‘frill’ just above the knee – and to the central part of his chest, just below his Decepticon insignia. Recessed detailing on his hips is covered with a dark, charcoal paint, and a gunmetal paint covers much of his upper arms and the base of his neck. Pretty much everything else is unpainted beige plastic and, again, even something as simple as a black wash could have presented a massive improvement.
Also, given that this is a Masterpiece figure, his arms are oddly boxy. Proportionally speaking, they're better than the Studio Series version, and a substantial improvement on the original Deluxe, but they're still made up mostly of the vehicle's uppermost section, just with more of it folded away or otherwise flattened out. Versus the CGI, the arms are both inaccurate in their shape and bulk, and lacking the arm extension gimmick included in the TF Dream Factory interpretation, Steel Claw. The upper arms look slightly better due entirely to the gunmetal paintwork, but the forearms feature an utter dearth of paint and only the shallowest of sculpted detail with obvious vehicle mode chunks on the sides and backs of each arm. The legs fare much better in terms of sculpting, while the paintwork remains perfunctory at best. Possibly the most impressive parts is the inclusion of the webbing on his claw-like feet, though the downside to the screen-accuracy here is that it's all the more obvious that his wheels are hollow shells, since they're rotated 180° below his ankles, leaving the insides facing outward.
But, aside from this, the screen accuracy is, I must admit, utterly unparalleled. Where the original Deluxe class Bonecrusher completely misinterpreted the mounting of the fork arm, and used its appearance within the fork's geared gimmick, and where the Studio Series just chucked it on his backpack, this figure actually has the fork arm transform into position behind and above the head, with two little struts clamping it to the spare tyres, which end up on his shoulders. Vehicle mode's actual windows end up wrapped around the shoulders, albeit without the pair of additional windows sticking up on each one. He has those weird spherical chunks below the shoulders and the spikes jutting out of his waist below them, the wheels inside his hips are the vehicle mode wheels (which can still spin!).
I'm even somewhat impressed by the handling of his back... or, at least, the upper half of it. A couple of vehicle mode panels fold round and tab together to form armour on his upper back, helping make the figure look less hollow, albeit covering over some sculpted detail on the main part of the body... but then the hips have the vehicle's mudguard hanging off the backs, as if he's wearing a tailcoat. While this looks untidy, it doesn't get in the way of the hip articulation for the most part and, frankly, it's tidier than the Studio Series figure, which had the mudguards broken up along the full length of the leg, from hip to foot. Where it does affect articulation is where the exhaust pipe attached to one of the mudguards, swinging around all too easily, and generally finding itself exactly where you don't want it to be when posing that leg.
Aside from the variations for his forks, Bonecrusher has no particularly worthwhile accessories. While TF Dream Factory's figure used components of vehicle mode to build up a handgun for the robot, the official, movie toy with its licensed vehicle mode stucks to what was seen on-screen. Thus, he comes with a set of flame effect parts - to recreate that scene in the movie where be barges through a bus and is briefly set aflame - which are molded in a translucent, rubbery plastic. By and large, they attach well enough, but a couple of parts (and one in particular) really don't fit very well. The one that's supposed to tab into his right shoulder and then wrap around the upper part doesn't like staying tabbed in, and will often fall off when the arm - or Bonecrusher as a whole - is moved. The one for the right foot is an excessively tight fit, and I'm never sure that it's fully attached. Even with all the parts connected, the 'fire' effect is perfunctory at best, and the fact that there's no paintwork on the flame effect parts exacerbates the lack of impact. On the upside, the aforementioned tabbed-together panel of armour on his back features a couple of tabs to connect whichever set of forks is not currently in use by the robot
Technically, another accessory is an alternate faceplate - with one eye popped out, to recreate the scene after Optimus Prime punches him on the chin just before decapitating him. While both faceplates look good, the 'eye popping' one really could have used some additional sculpted damage, if not a wholly unique paint job. Both of them have smudges of brown just like the lower legs, while the metallic internal detailing and the standard eyes are all part of the head behind the faceplate. It also seems to me that the 'cables' leading to the popped eye on the alternate face sculpt are set a little high on the head, making it look as though the eye is drooping from his brow rather than its socket.
Bonecrusher comes packaged in vehicle mode and, at least on mine, some parts weren’t fully tabbed together to begin with, leaving some quite nasty gaps in some seams. As a result, my first impressions of his transformation into vehicle mode weren’t great. I tried to follow the provided instructions to get him into robot mode, but a combination of muddy printing and poor choice of angle obfuscated what turned out to be a largely fluid and intuitive process. That’s not to say it isn’t complicated: it absolutely is, and far beyond even the 2009 RotF Leader class Optimus Prime. There are lots of small steps for the purpose of improving small details – such as the 'webbing' surrounding the wheels on his feet – but then some baffling omissions and over-simplifications, the way the arms are handled in particular. Much like the original Deluxe and the Studio Series toy, the arms are made up of the upper portion of the vehicle, with the back end resolving into his forearms and sections of the roof folding back onto his shoulders. This leaves the both the forearms and the shoulders looking very boxy, with only shallow detail sculpted on the inner faces of some vehicle mode panels. Perhaps the worst feature of the arms is the way the hands transform: his two fingers are a single piece of plastic, with the two thumbs folded in from either side, and the back of each hand is an angled panel from the sides of the vehicle, all of which conspires to make the hands look like an afterthought. Not only were the hands dealt with better on the Third Party alternative, they were done better on both the original Deluxe and the Studio Series toy. Features like the balls that swing out to the sides of his chest have to be transformed in a very particular order – as I found to my cost the first time I tried, ending up having to undo half the transformation before I could move them – and parts like the side windows from the vehicle’s cab don’t peg into place in robot mode, and consequently end up just hanging out under his armpits. Similarly the sides of the vehicle mode’s front end remain attached to the hip joints and, while they can be swung back and forth independently of the hips and are somewhat concealed behind them by default, they don’t actually tab in anywhere, and never look ‘right’, regardless of where they’re placed.
Given Bonecrusher’s awkward, alien design, it’s always surprised me how well articulated his toys have been. Granted, the original Deluxe essentially cheated the presence of elbows by including a means of extending his arms, and neither that nor the Studio Series had waist joints, but Bonecrusher's short legs and awkward arms have had precious little negative impact on the figures’ ability to strike a dramatic pose. Thankfully, then, the Masterpiece doesn’t buck this trend and, on articulation alone, is easily the best interpretation of Bonecrusher so far, but for a couple of significant caveats. To start with, the hands are appalling. He has wrist rotation, and each thumb has a single pinned knuckle after its transformation joint… but that’s it. The two fingers on each hand are not articulated in any way, and only move for transformation. Given that he only has two fingers on each hand, and they're not exactly small, this is a ridiculous omission on a Masterpiece figure. The feet get by with ankle tilt alone, unless you count the joint on the heel claw, and then the neck is only marginally less limited than that of the Studio Series toy, with a hinge at the base of the neck for side-to-side movement, and a ball joint at the back of the head that allows for tilt, a tiny bit more range to either side, and the bare minimum of up/down tilt. The transformation joint for the head/collar increases the range of up/down tilt, but I’m not convinced that’s intentional. On the upside, the hips have a great range forward, backward and out to the sides, there’s a rotation joint just above the knee, and the knee itself bends to 90°. There is a waist joint that seems largely unimpeded, but the cab’s side windows often find themselves wedged against his hips. The arms may lack the extension feature of the original Deluxe, but they’re still far better than the SS toy, with double-jointed elbows and rotation just above the elbow. His shoulders can rotate a full 360° (assuming the claw arm isn’t in the way), raise out to the sides by about 90°, and then the shoulder joints themselves can be raised and lowered within the window/armour wrapped around them, to further emphasise his hunched appearance. The claw arm retains its full range from vehicle mode, but can also split at about the halfway point, into two separate forks that are hinged at the base so they can be fanned out, as well as having four ball joints each: one for each of the outer blades, then one per pair of inner blades on each side.
While MPM Bonecrusher was my first purchase of 2025, I’m fairly certain that it’ll be high on the list of TransFormers I’ve bought when my next Anniversary post rolls around in September… there’s even the chance that it’ll be at the top of the list, it’s that good. It could have been substantially improved by a dark wash to make him look grubbier, and to bring out some of the details, while the way the hands were dealt with is appalling for a figure that would normally have cost over £150, but I’m happy to say that my early impressions of the figure were entirely wrong. But for the miserly paint job and those few caveats, this is unmistakably a Masterpiece figure, not just an oversized Leader class toy.
Nevertheless, I still wouldn't pay full price for it... Maybe, if it had the kind of flourishes that made the Masterpiece line what it was during its first few years, it would have been worth full price. As it stands, £88 was about right, and I'm glad I was able to snap one up while Game still had stocks... I get the impression that, unlike the more recent MPM-15 Brawl, Bonecrusher wasn't exactly selling well at his full original price. It's a shame, because it's a truly great interpretation of an awesome CGI design... but it could have been so much better with a paintjob, proper wheels with rubber tyres, and perhaps a few refinements to the transformation of the arms, to match its premium price point.
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