War for Cybertron: Siege Skytread Flywheels

One of the biggest surprises of the Power of the Primes line was the appearance of the G1 Duocon Battletrap in the form of two combining figures - Battleslash and Roadtrap. Before the first images turned up - a remarkably short time before the two figures actually arrived in shops - there had been no hints of Duocons featuring in PotP, but they turned out to be the most innovative offering of the line, which was otherwise a retread of Combiner Wars with added elements of Titans Return.

Of course, making Battletrap surely meant that a full Duocon Flywheels was on his way, to replace the poorly-executed and otherwise redundant Titan Master/Triple-changing Vehicle combination, Skytread, released under the Titans Return banner, right?

Well... Kinda... In fact, it didn't happen at all within Power of the Primes, and when the second Duocon was finally revealed, he turned out to be a closer homage to the G1 toy than Battletrap had been...

Power of the Primes Battleslash & Roadtrap (aka Duocon Battletrap)

One thing post-Diaclone Generation 1 got right was its constant innovation within the concept of 'TransFormers'. Even when the toys these innovations delivered were objectively crap, and ridiculously simplistic compared to the sort of thing Takara had originally produced, it was the toymaking technology, not the new ideas, that let them down.

Combiners, HeadMasters and PowerMasters were all prime examples of this, as Hasbro's more recent reboots of the concepts have clearly proven: components of each gestalt have had reasonable vehicle modes and fully articulated robot modes, while the gestalts themselves are also fully articulated. HeadMasters and PowerMasters may have been boiled down to a single core concept for Titans Return, but each has delivered fully articulated 'bots in five different size classes, with varying degrees of compatibility with the mini-figures.

Power of the Primes has not only developed the Titan Masters concept further, but reintroduced another old G1 concept... Starting with the Duocon Battletrap.

I'd considered splitting this into three separate posts - Battleslash, Roadtrap and finally Battletrap... but I figured that'd just take me too long to complete... So here's the full set, all in one!