Review: #741
Name: Wild Rider
Brand: Transformers
Allegiance: Decepticon
Line: Generations - Legacy
Year of Release: 2022
Size Class: Deluxe (Wave 2)
Mold Status: new
VEHICLE MODE:
Wild Rider (two words, not one for this version) transforms into a sports car that takes cues from a Ferrari 308 GTB.
Unlike the Combiner Wars version, this one is much more inspired by his G1 appearance, so it retains the older styled vehicle.
There are plenty of nice details here, from the red transparent windshield and windows, the painted rims and the red stripe across the vehicle.
The pair of guns peg on top. It can either peg separately on each port, or you can plug the two guns together and then peg it on one port.
A good vehicle mode, the only way it could improve is probably if the guns could have stored underneath the vehicle out of sight.
TRANSFORMATION:
Wild Rider is very easy to transform. The back splits in two and unfolds to form the legs. The arms from the sides, and the hood along with the roof forms the backpack. The hood does split to give him "wings" of sorts, but... the execution is not great.
ROBOT MODE:
Wild Rider's robot mode is pretty good, although he's a bit bland in the legs. Similar to Dragstrip, he doesn't have any paint on his lower body.
Given that the design doesn't have many obvious car elements, this means that most of it ends up as backpack kibble. Officially, in the instructions, the hood splits into three, giving him wings of sort, but makes it messier and more in the way.
The head sculpt is fine, the red used for his face is a nice rich red.
In terms of size, he's about average for a Deluxe here as well, above is a comparison against Siege Sideswipe.
If you are not a fan of the split hood, you can actually leave it fully intact, and this cleans it up considerably. To be fair, the split hood isn't as bad in person as it looked in photos.
Articulation is fine, he has joints for his head, shoulders, elbows, waist, hips, knees and ankles.
He comes with a pair of guns as weapons.
He can hold the weapon in either hand, and they can can peg together to form a slightly bigger weapon at the cost of it looking sillier.
The guns can peg behind his legs for storage when not in use.
The hips are not balljoints, rather they are pinned, and this means that they suffer from the minor flaw shared with ratchet joints where the spacing is a tad bit too far apart, so that either Wild Rider is standing with legs completely straight, or they're in an A-pose that's too far apart to look natural.
Despite his hips, the robot mode is great and is a fine update for the character.
OVERALL:
Wild Rider is a simple but solid figure. He doesn't have any compromises from being a combiner (helped by the fact that Motormaster does most of the heavy work for Menasor rather than the limbs). The kibble on his back is kind of weird, and feels like a waste of budget to allow it to split like that when it doesn't look great, but can be otherwise easily ignored.
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