Well, after spending more time with the PCC Combaticons, my opinion has only changed for the worse.
Bombshock -- the commander -- is still pretty neat. All three modes - vehicle, robot, and gestalt core -- are all well executed. The way that his arms lock into his shoulders when forming the gestalt is particularly nice, as is the articulation built into the core.
The drones, however, fail hard. There is no meaningful articulation in the arms -- they just go up and down and don't bend at all. Worse, the claw hands, which initially looked promising, only stay out if the drone is pointed down. I'm amused by a limp-wristed Bruticus, but disappointed that this bit of "articulation" is unintentional and uncontrollable. The tank drone is particularly disappointing -- it's essentially a brick that opens up slightly. The G1 combiners accomplished this just fine, and they had robot modes.
The legs fail even worse. Despite opening up at the bottom to provide more surface area to cover the ground, they're not stable. The armored car drone will not support any weight except on the small square rectangle at the front of the car. It also pops out of the core connector any time any stress is put on the leg. It will support some weight in some other positions, but even getting Bruticus to stand up straight takes some effort.
This makes it an exercise in frustration to try and pose Bruticus. Most of the time, he'll fall over. Try and fix it and one or both legs are likely to pop out. Bombshock's legs have plenty of articulation points, but the connection is too weak to sustain any posing and the surface area of the feet too small to support any pose that isn't essentially straight up.
As a test, I started from a neutral "stand straight up" position and attempted to pose Bruticus three different ways, using ROTF Brawn as a model.
"Dynamic Walking" pose
- Brawn took 3 seconds
- Bruticus took a minute, legs popped out four times.
"Bended Knee" pose
- Brawn took 10 seconds
- Bruticus took 30 seconds, leg popped out once.
"Dodging Fire" pose
- Brawn took 10 seconds
- Bruticus took a minute, legs popped out four times
- Furthermore, I couldn't really duplicate Brawn's pose:
- Brawn looks like he belongs in The Matrix.
- Bruticus looks like he's taking a dump.
In every case, I had to spend half the time trying to balance Bruticus and the legs would pop out some of the times I simply picked him up. Frustrating and disappointing.
Modern Transformers have gone a long way in terms of articulation and posability. I would have been willing to forego all of the vehicles having robot modes if it led to a combiner that was stable and highly posable. PCC isn't it, not by a longshot.
I'm thinking of returning it, along with the Aerialbots, Huffer, and Smolder. Really, *really* disappointed, especially with the legs ejecting themselves if you look at them funny.
Edit: I just picked it up for a second and placed it back on the table. It lost its balance, spun around, and ejected both legs before falling onto the table.
It's going back. PCC? More like POS.
since it b1g1 50 off grabbed an extra animated cyb ratchet
it, this is good enough". I canceled all my PCC preorders (making them the first non-recolored figures I won't be picking up since Armada Laserbeak). Ah well, money saved and all that.
