Sludge, Power of The Primes, Quick `n` Nasty review

POTP, the line I thought I wouldn’t really care about.  To be honest, I am no way as interested in this line as I was the Legends line.  I even decided to forsake the Dinobots at first, however as the plastic crack addiction has it’s icy hand on my heart and after seeing them in store I caved and picked some up. 

As I am in love with little headmaster-y robots, I was extremely likely to get the Prime Masters and pretenders anyway (I also love pretenders).  Due to Grimlock’s horrible dimensions and volcanius looking kinda lame, I was happy to ignore the Dinobots as a whole.

Now I have Sludge.  By far my favourite of the original Dinobots and the one I wanted the most (but was never able to find) when I was a kid.


Sludge transforms into a brontosaurus, which I am pleased to say appears to be an approved Dinosaur again!

Design is simple enough and transformation seems to copy the G1 toy faithfully.  I am please to say that there is a slight upgrade in transformation, as the tail manages to fit inside the legs now for a cleaner robot mode.  It’s familiar, but pleasant.

Colour wise he is just what you’d think.  Gun metal plastic, with red and gold bits here and there.
Rather nicely, to simulate the gold covered head and bits look of the original toys, they’ve gone the extra mile and replicated the effect.  In some places, they have a gold coloured inside with a clear plastic over the top, or they’ve painted the INSIDE of the clear plastic
.

 

Both ways seem to produce a rather nice effect.

Bronty Sludge looks nicely stompy.  His rear legs are somewhat small though and the feet are angled without any ankle joints, essentially limiting the back legs to one pose. 

He also has a lot of holes for mounting either the hand piece or weapons on his back.  He also has a couple of pegs for sitting the Prime masters on his back. If you have enough weapons and stuff, you can shove some guns onto the Prime Armour and have that as a kind of weapon battery on his back.  It can look cool with the right weapons.

Overall the dino mode is quite cool and heavily G1 inspired.
As I said before, transformation is nicely familiar with a few twists.  The end result is a nicely cartoon inspired Sludge. His head is big and nicely expressive.  He comes with his “Prime Amour” which is the hand for combined mode, and a blaster rifle. The Prime Armour doesn’t manage to look very cool, no matter where you stick it.

Paint is lacking, but there are a few paint apps applied in place of stickers and I must admit that overall I like the look of the robot mode.  The combiner joint doesn't intrude all that much, which is nice.

Posing is pretty good with this guy and he has a heap of joints and he is easy to get in good poses with good balance.  Sculpting is pretty nice as well. I really like his head sculpt and he also has a rather cool gun. Sadly no sword, or missile launcher. 

He does have a slight problem with his hands not pointing straight, which I think is due to  left over nubs from where the piece were joined onto the tree during manufacture (maybe) on the wrists or hand somewhere.

In the end, I really like this guy and am glad I picked him up despite my reservations about him being a combiner now.  Luckily the leg and arm modes don’t hinder the robot mode and in fact, may even have added a joint or two we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.  You can happily play with Sludge and completely forget he is now a combiner figure. This is good.

About my only real complaint I have about him is that he comes across as a little small.  As a brontosaurus, I’ve always wanted a nice big Sludge. I guess it’s a hangover from the Dinoriders where their Brontosaurus was a mobile base.  Sludge should be the biggest of the Dinobots, and I should be able to use him as a walking base of destruction. Sadly his small size kind of ruins this, especially when standing next to the other POTP Dinobots.

 

Final thoughts?  Well, I certainly dont regret buying him!