Superlink Shadowhawk Cosmo Type

If there's one thing that can be said in favour of Energon/Superlink, it's that it did things very differently from both Armada/Micron Legend, which it followed, and Cybertron/Galaxy Force, which it preceded, albeit with mixed success. A lot of the larger figures were slightly higher-tech looking, but still much the same level of intricacy as the former, while the smaller size classes included an imaginative range of robots and alternate modes, some of which ended up getting reused in the earliest movie toylines.

One of the oddities of the line was that Takara released a few variants that appeared even in the US version of the TV show, but weren't picked up by Hasbro for release in the Western markets. One such figure was the blue repaint of Shadowhawk/Divebomb, and the somewhat limited nature of its release put the so-called 'Cosmo Type' on my radar.