War for Cybertron Trilogy Centurion Drone

Something I wasn't aware of when I wrote about Brunt was that his design had been based on the Centurion droids from the IDW comics, as a massive improvement on the crummy, seemingly Fantasy-influenced design of the green, dome-headed droids from the G1 cartoon. It seemed only logical, then, that a repaint should be in the works, since the figure seemed to be very much geared toward those who like to build armies of identical figures, like the Vehicons from TransFormers Prime.

Leave it to Hasbro, then, to re-release the figure only as part of a limited edition boxed set, along with a set of accessories missing from their individual toys. And, typically, it was long sold out by the time Hasbro Pulse reached the UK.

Since Brunt was - for my money - about the best toy in the entire Siege line, I was keen to get hold of the repaint, even if troop-building was out of the question (had been desirable to me in the first place, which it... wasn't... honest). The set was re-released by Takara Tomy earlier this year, but that set was equally hard to find. Thankfully, the repaint figure was the only part of the boxed set that I wanted, so I figured it was only a matter of time before someone put it up on eBay having bought the set for the accessories. Back over the summer, that's exactly what happened, so I snapped him up.

Studio Series #11 Lockdown

It should be noted, first of all, that I did not dislike the Age of Extiction toyline's Lockdown toy. Prewarned that it was a bit rubbish, I bought it with suitably low expections and found it to be a competent toy with a fun transformation and a rather cool head-gun accessory... However, recognising that it was a poor representation of the character from the movie, I was quick to buy Unique Toys' Masterpiece-scale interpretation, Peru Kill, long before Studio Series Lockdown was announced.

So when the photos of Hasbro's entirely new take on the nonpartisan bounty hunter surfaced, I was impressed but, initially, not that interested... We all know how these things go, with my collecting habits, and I ended up ordering him almost as soon as he became available. How many Lockdowns does one collector need?

Unique Toys R-01 Peru Kill

Lockdown was an interesting addition to the fourth live action TransFormers movie, Age of Extinction, and potentially a clever addition to the franchise. Sadly, 'clever' is not a word that can be associated with the live action movies made thusfar under the auspices of Paramount and Michael Bay. In typical Hollywood fashion, he was killed off in the climactic battle of that movie, having very graphically killed off one of the Autobots from the first three movies right near the start (and several others off-screen, it's strongly implied).

There was a Deluxe class Lockdown released as part of Hasbro's mercifully brief Age of Extinction toyline, but it was one of the worst-received figures that year - short, blocky, weirdly-proportioned, and molded in entirely the wrong colours of plastic, about the only thing right about it was the way the face-cannon worked. Even so, and perhaps because I already had low expectations when I picked him up, I quite liked it. It wasn't perfect, but the transformation was reasonably clever, even if the results weren't quite right.

While Hasbro are due to release their Studio Series remake of AoE Lockdown pretty soon, Unique Toys have beaten them to the punch with a larger - essentially Masterpiece-scale - interpretation of this underutilised yet impressive character, under the baffling name of 'Peru Kill'.

Age of Extinction/Generations Lockdown

I'm not sure exactly when I became aware that Lockdown was a character in Age of Extinction, or that he was the robot whose head 'grows' a massive great face-cannon, but he was one of the few interesting elements of the movie. Neither Autobot nor Decepticon, Lockdown, much like his TransFormers Animated progenitor, is a freelance peacekeeping agent bounty hunter who, for reasons revealed only quite late in the film, has come to Earth and allied himself with a group of humans (echoing some aspects of Dark of the Moon).

While I'd originally intended to hold out for the Japanese version of this toy, despite the additional cost, I ended up buying the Hasbro US version in Forbidden Planet while on an evening out with my girlfriend, simply because I'd heard it was terrible enough that even the import version wasn't going to be any good, and this one was convenient... Plus, by the looks of things, Lockdown and other later-wave figures may not appear in UK Toys'R'Us stores...

Galaxy Force Flame Convoy

Leader of the Beast Planet, Animatros, Flame Convoy is initially cast as a Decepticon though, in common with many of the characters in Galaxy Force - as opposed to Hasbro's localisation, Cybertron - he has no real allegiance, as such. He is simply the leader of his own planet... and got to that position by being the most powerful TransFormer on the planet.