After making a splash - not a big one - in the comics, Impactor needed a toy. Hasbro came through by retooling Onslaught, which has had 3 releases in the USA alone. Hasbro really knows how to get mileage out of a combiner mold these days, and I gotta say this may be one of the more inspired toys - not just because of the character, but the colors really work too.
This was part of the fourth wave of the Generations relaunch from 2012-present. It hit around July, while wave 3 was December - it was a huge gap and a lot of people (yours truly included) was wondering if this was to be another one of those "lost waves" that Hasbro has been increasingly fond of dumping in Canada and/or Asia and/or Europe since 2010. Thankfully they hit here, but they sold quickly at one per case and interest on the secondary market shows there weren't a heck of a lot of these out there. Packaged in robot mode, the figure is effectively an orange Onslaught with two new heads - one for the combiner - and a new rocket-launching weapon. For whatever reason, Hasbro gave the retooled toys from the first four waves extra, really cool weapons.
In vehicle mode, the toy looks more convincing than his Decepticon siblings - the bright orange with blue looks like a toy or a space vehicle, so it just plain clicks. The Onslaught gun mounts on his roof, and the new gun plugs right in to that. I've noticed that the new gun is very loose in Impactor's hands, so you may as well leave them piggybacked - they were packaged this way, after all. The vehicle has rolling wheels, and getting all the pegs and panels in place may require a tiny bit more elbow grease than you might have hoped for. It's a fairly simple transformation, but the "am I doing this wrong?" factor can get annoying if you crack it open in the middle of the night and are tired anyway.
This is a finicky toy, but not one that requires instructions to go from vehicle to robot. Now if you want to get that Ruination torso mode right, consult the documentation - it's pretty cool, and is based on Xaaron.
I am not a huge fan of the robot mode, but the deco and head won me over. Impactor has robot lips and a head that looks sort of like Ironhide, and while his awkward arms are still unpleasant little things they're easy to see past. Check out that cool Wreckers symbol, it's in blue and looks like an Autobot sigil with a hammer in the middle. The combo weapon has no problem fitting in his hand, but the joints don't hold up to gravity so well. The arms feel rushed, or simplified to appease the needs of a combining toy. Having said that, it's still one of the coolest-looking figures in this particular subset.
For some reason I sat on the Wreckers for months before opening them, which was probably a mistake. I really do like this figure a lot more than most of the other Wreckers, but I'm not overly fond of these combiner molds after ending up with three versions of Bruticus and now a fourth one as Ruination. An all-new Impactor would be most welcome, but given the lack of Ironfist and other popular characters from the Wreckers in the comics, I'm not holding my breath. If you stumble on this one, he's a keeper if for no reason other than it's a striking toy to have on your shelves. That orange, man. Beautiful.
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