The moment I learned that Unique Toys were planning to develop Stinger for their line of Masterpiece-analogues, my curiosity was piqued. After all, this was a nonentity who dissolved into a flying cloud of metal cubes rather than transforming. When the first
grey prototype images appeared, I was instantly hooked. My experience
with Unique Toys products thusfar has been uniformly positive: their
engineering has always been clever without being overly complex and their QC has yet to disappoint.
However, in terms of screen-accuracy, particularly on their head sculpts, they've never been 100% on the mark,
which resulted in some of their more recent figures later being 'fixed' by cheaper
knockoffs.
Their strategy for this figure was to cut down on paint applications to
reduce the retail price as far as they could, in the hope that people would
buy the original rather than wait for a KO, and they teased the release
of a Camaro Bumblebee with much the same robot mode as additional motivation -
the suggestion being that the reception of Red Destroyer will determine
whether the yellow Camaro goes into production. Their paintwork has almost always been considered lacking by fans
and, coupled with the eyewatering prices of some figures
and inaccuracies in their sculpts, they've given the KO merchants ample
room to make improvements in the past. Dialling things back
even further seems like the worst decision to me. As it turned out, they revealed images of the Camaro remix within a month of Red Destroyer shipping.
But let's see how Red Destroyer stands as his own product, before
anyone has the opportunity to reverse engineer it and produce a cheaper
option.
