TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2012 (Timelines) Gigatron

Despite hailing from the end of Generation 1, Overlord is not a character I'd been particularly aware of until comparatively recently, since I'd 'grown out' of collecting TransFormers by the time he arrived in the UK. My first experience of him in anything like his original form was via the Titans Return version, which was a little too cut-down in terms of functionality versus the G1 original. Improved articulation only gets you so far, after all.

However, I believe that my first experience of the character was via this strange BotCon exclusive repaint of the Revenge of the Fallen/N.E.S.T. Global Alliance Bludgeon, itself a reimagining of a G1 Pretender. While that character wasn't the best fit for a movie offshoot toyline, the figure was great... and I might have been in the market for some of the other repaints if they weren't all so hard to obtain, to one degree or another.

I missed out on this figure around the time of BotCon 2012, but eventually found one reasonably priced on eBay, and took the plunge, even though a tank-only version of the character is already missing half of what made the original so interesting. How does it compare, though..?

Titans Return Overlord & Dreadnaut

While I felt a little deprived over the likes of Fortress Maximus never appearing in UK toy shops (since he actually appeared in the Marvel comics, albeit at the same dubiously variable scale as he seems to have used in the cartoon), I wasn't even aware of the likes of Overlord until I became an adult collector, because I'd stopped collecting by the time he was released over here... and, these days, the lustre of most G1 toys has faded somewhat.

Overlord, being one of the 'playset' TransFormers toys, may yet have had a place in my collection, alongside my original G1 Metroplex, Scorponok and (2015's Platinum Edition) Trypticon as well, because he's unique in that he's a triple-changing dual-Powermaster with a fairly decent, quite sprawling base mode, but the lack of articulation in the robot mode is more of a sticking point for me these days than it would have been only a few years back.

But then Hasbro decided to update him for Titans Return, and a widespread release was more-or-less guaranteed (the 'less' part being dependency on Hasbro's increasingly dodgy distribution). As usual, I umm-ed and ahh-ed about whether or not to get him, more or less deciding against based on a couple of YouTube video reviews... but then caved in and forked out £60 for him at TFNation 2017.

So, was he worth it..?