Fall of Cybertron: Brawl

Brawl from the Combaticons was always a favourite of mine.  Who doesn’t love a tank that becomes a leg with the turret off the knee?  I really liked the way he had the extra twin barrels that could plug into the back of the tank.  Nice.

 

Brawl was in the War For Cybertron game and you got to play as him a couple of times.  I actually quite liked him in WFC.  Onslaught was in there too, but only as an online character.  Brawl as you can probably tell by the name is not a smart fellow and known for strength and firepower.  This toy though based on his FOC appearance is almost the same as him in WFC.  Yay!

 

 

Brawl is a floating twin turreted tank.  You can add the pistol for his robot mode in between the turrets to make him a triple turreted tank. 

 

 

As you can see there isn’t much pain involved, but what is there is crisp.  The vehicle mode is very well done, including the big gap at the front.  It looks like he has treads on the side, but since he has a hover mode and I assume the treads come down when vehicle boosting, I guess hover mode is best for this smaller figure.  The robot mode is pretty close as well. 

 

In FOC (story mode) Brawl ,is slightly taller the the other Combaticons, multiplayer has him as tall as Megatron and WFC had him somewhere in between.  Sadly the toy is actually one of the smaller looking fellows.  Probably because his build is a lot more compact that the likes of say Swindle.

 

The back and front both have gaps in them.  Wow.  The one at the back can be covered up by the connector joint luckily though.  I really like the design of the tank, I just wish it was a voyager.  But then it wouldn’t fit on Bruticus.

 

Underneath you can see  the robot chest, but it doesn’t look bad.  Having him next to Swindle isn’t such a good idea.

 

 

The sculpting is pretty good, the face, general body, gun and back top of the turret both look very nice.

 

 

While those bits are impressive though, he looks just awful from the rear as most of his bits just hang of his back.

 

 

His toes are pretty useless as well.  They form the thumb for Bruticus when you have Brawl as an arm.  On mine and others’ as well I have found out, they are so loose that he is always ready to topple over at the drop of a hat.

 

So it’s a bit of a mixed bag with Brawl.  Good tank mode, good robot mode (from the front) but it looks bad from pretty much any other angle, nice sculpting, but being a small looking figure doesn’t help his strength feel.  He also makes both an impressive leg and a pretty good arm.  The arm is a bit strange, but the fore-arm and hands seem to work ok, and the tank body and turret form a kind of shield with a huge cannon on it.  I like it, but it’s a shame that Vortex and Blast-Off don’t make such nice legs.

 

Once again, a bit of fiddling is required to get the best out of him as a limb.  When using him as a leg, I suggest not locking the rear of the tank to the turret as doing this give him a fair bit of movement for the sole of the foot.  Plus it looks better as a knee guard of sorts.

 

Oh and a bit of playing with his tank mode can create a little artillery mode for him as well if you so desire.

 

 

Not bad for a first attempt.