Combiner Wars Superion

This being the toyline called 'Combiner Wars', of course there's more to it than just groups of individual Deluxes with a Voyager class team leader. These things do actually combine to form gestalt robots and, unlike Generation 1's diminutive combiners, the size class of the components involved means that the combined mode is pretty colossal by the standards of contemporary TransFormers toys - easily exceeding what now passes for Leader class.

But we all know these gestalts are big... are they actually any good?

Combiner Wars Alpha Bravo

The wild-card in the set, Alpha Bravo is a whole new Aerialbot, replacing - temporarily, at least - Slingshot from the old Generation 1 character roster. Being a helicopter, he was also quite a blatant hint that the Protectobot Blades was on his way and, knowing Hasbro, set to be reused - likely with minimal, if any alteration - as the Combaticon Vortex (a move confirmed at this year's BotCon, when testshots of the Combaticons were first revealed).

Naturally there was a massive fan outcry when Alpha Bravo was revealed - not least over his nondescript name - which may have led to the repurposing of Firefly as 'Quickslinger'... but was it at all necessary, or is this a decent replacement for the loud-mouthed Aerialbot?

Combiner Wars Firefly

With a team made up of four Deluxe aircraft and one Voyager, I wonder if Hasbro were tempted to pull the same trick as they did with Energon/Superlink and use only two unique Deluxe models with the colourschemes creating the characters. Thankfully, the designers of Combiner Wars have been clever with their parts counts... and probably had slightly higher budgets, and so the Aerialbots have four mostly unique models with only a few shared parts between two of them.

Firefly - formerly Fireflight - is one of the entirely unique molds... but is that necessarily a good thing?

Combiner Wars Air Raid

When Hasbro declined to release the second wave of Combiner Wars toys across Europe, citing a lack of interest from vendors, that left collectors with an oh-so-nearly complete Superion and/or only the first component of Menasor, potentially leaving many fans unable to complete their contemporary sets of Generation 1's biggest rivals, the airborne Autobot team and the Decepticon road warriors.

This, obviously, is where the online retailers prove very useful... though the final component of Superion, Air Raid, sold out pretty quickly almost everywhere (mine is actually the US-style package, meaning I got a comic rather than a collectors' card, but pretty much everything else is standard) so I consider myself quite lucky.

But, of course, it's still a Hasbro product, so was it really worth the effort of tracking it down?

Combiner Wars Skydive

I can still remember being distinctly unimpressed by the G1 Aerialbots. They were small and awkward-looking, terribly basic, even by G1 standards, and not even as well-designed as the G1 Stunticons... With Combiner Wars remaking all the limb-bots as contemporary Deluxe class figures, it was tempting to hope that the new Aerialbots would take on board the lessons of the many Third Party gestalts doing the rounds...

But this is a creation of Hasbro, and they've been in full-on cost-cutting mode for ages... so it's bound to be a disaster, right?

Combiner Wars Silverbolt

Now that Combiner Wars is in full swing (kinda), I've even more glad I didn't bother buying the Universe/Classics Silverbolt back in 2008, instead choosing the Darkwind repaint. It was utterly daft of Hasbro to release a Silverbolt remake that wasn't going to be part of a gestalt because the whole point of Silverbolt is that he's the leader of a gestalt team of flight-capable Autobots... and he's afraid of heights. Leading the team and becoming the main part of Superion is all intended to keep his mind off his phobia long enough to do something useful. Take the team away from him, and there's really no point to a Silverbolt toy (unless it's an update to the Fuzor - go on, Hasbro, you know you wanna).

But back in 2008, Hasbro had no apparent plans to do any more combiners, repeatedly telling BotCon attendees that they weren't financially or technically viable these days. More than five years later, and in the wake of a veritable plethora of third party combiners, Hasbro announced its latest phase in the continuation of the Classics line: Combiner Wars... and one of the first teams to be released is the Aerialbots... meaning, at long last, we have a true Silverbolt