Snarl - Power of the Primes version review.

With my recent dive into the wonders of the POTP Terrorcons, the thought of the new Siege Apeface and more monstery robots, I started to dig out the Dinobots I have.  A disturbingly long while ago, I blogged about Sludge and how he impressed me enough to get Slag and Swoop.  Having being impressed at how Swoop and Cutthroat were so similar in their base body, I was curious to check out other figures.  I dug out Snarl…  He looks very similar to Sinnertwin.  So here I am having a look at Snarl.  No points for guessing who is next.


Snarl was the only G1 Dinobot I owned as a kid and even then it was the gold box re-release with the red body.  Snarl to me was a great toy, it looked impressive with his awesomely shiny glorious golden tail split over his back, big chest and nice head sculpt.  Finally, the Stegosaurus was among the top 5 dinosaurs that I loved and thought were awesome.



Power of the Primes Snarl is a good decent bot.

The robo-colours.

The colours are based on the G1 toy and follow them pretty well.  With some minor changes.
The red chest follows the Dinobot uniform and his limbs are peppered with metallic grey parts. Looking from the top, his arms have a lot more colour variance than they used to have.   He now sports three colours, gold, grey, black, as opposed to his previous grey and black.  Interestingly his forearms are coloured gold, but the plastic appears to be silver plastic.  Interesting choice, especially since he has an abundance of gold plastic all-over the place.  It does give him a little highlight of silver right on the elbows, although it’s so small, I never noticed it until now. 

What I like about the POTP Dinobots, and I mentioned this in Sludge’s post was that they  used clear plastic and painted the inside of the plastic.  Snarl has this effect on the shoulders/upper arms of his robot mode mode.  It successfully simulates the tech-glass-detailed parts of the original toy.  Snarl has a nice gold and metal grey colouring inside his shoulders and it looks great.

His waist and legs are black, with the silver and gold bits of the Stegosaurus there.  Paint wise, it seems that it’s been mostly used to keep the uniformity of gold and silver going throughout.  He does have a couple of details on his shins and either side of his combiner port.  It manages to successfully look like the stickers of the old toy.

From the back.

There is very little black. A lot of red, silver and grey. No decals but a fair bit of…

Ambient sculpting.

Since most of the sculpting is used on the dinosaur mode it will make the dino bit a little shorter.
He has some cool panelling lines, vents and sort of circuit things going on.  Having a good look over, it seems they struck a really nice balance between not enough detail and JUST enough detail this is also aided by the use both the clear plastic painting technique and dino-bits to break up flat surfaces on the robot mode.  All over, he is just a generally really nice looking robot.

Good looking bot

His face sculpt is delightful (not emotionally).  Well, actually he looks like a grumpy old bugger.  He has a nice looking combo of cartoon, vs. toy.  The black helmet, angled horns and nice crest picked it in silver with almost standard issue vents inside (so many Transformers had these in them).  But the best part is without a doubt the  face.  Wonderful silver, dark red eyes, some cheek lines, which I can’t tell are due to the way the face assembles to the head, or whether it a painted line.  The nose is nicely proportioned and he has a frowny mouth.  To emphasise frown, he actually has frowny lines on his jowls.  I think  they are exaggerated somewhat, but it would pretty hard to pick them out otherwise and they look fine. 

Better than fine, in fact as they successfully show off how unhappy this poor guy is. Wonderful.

Wiggle-Bits

• Head is on a ball joint but the shape of his helmet hinders up down a fair bit.
• Arms have shoulder ball joints, bicep swivel and hinged elbows and wrists.  The wrists are mainly due to transformation.
• Swivel waist, ball jointed hips and thigh swivels and knee hinges.  That is all.

Not a whole heap, but it is enough.  Anymore would be waisted, except for perhaps a wrist swivel as he has a sword.  Anyway, due to his lower legs being so huge, they kind of limit the articulation options a lot.  The upper arms at the shoulders are a huge circular area and they can sometimes be inhibited by the tail over his shoulders.

At the hips, the top of the leg joint is pretty square and can clash with the waist piece limiting the movement from there, on top of that, the beast bits in the calf section are rather chunky and limit the bend of the knee.  As a result, posing the legs for Snarl can be tricky.  The arms however are kind of free from hindrance and pretty adequate, sometimes you may have to angle the tail out as it does lean in to the shoulders.

Accessories.

He comes with clear plastic sword, which looks really nice and the POTP armour which can  become a gestalt's hand.  I really like the sword… as usual I’m a bit unsold on the armour.

 

While Sludge could kind of make it useful in dino mode and Cutthroat can use it effectively as a jetpack looking thing in both modes, Snarl here can either use it as pregnant armour, or a thing connected to his upper arm.  I guess the arm situation could be a shield, but it’s far too chunky.  There is nowhere else to really plug it though, which I think is an oversight, but considering the stegosaurus plates, it’s understandable.

You can take the plastic plug out the the armour thing and put in either a head or a Prime master guy in there. 

Start the reactor! Free Mars!

Theoretically the armour can also be used as a weapon as well, but it doesn’t really look like one.

If you take a gun from one of the others he looks pretty cool.  With just the sword, he still looks cool, just a little lacking.

There are some Titan master mounts on the back and a couple on some of the plates.  None of these are really useable in robot mode.

Transformation.

The transformation into dino mode is pretty obvious, however I always find the calf panels a pain to fit together(and unclip) when flipping over the legs.  From Dino to robot mode, it’s tricky too as they slip together REALLY well.  I guess you could say that pieces getting in the way of other pieces is a small problem to Snarl’s smooth transformation as I have (to a lesser extent) have trouble with the tail bits conflicting with other bits too.  It is very minor, but manages to slow down transforming him.  Also when going from Dino to robot mode, I can’t get his head out easily.  Could just be my bigger hands though for that one. Nothing a stab with his sword (in his chest no doubt!) doesn’t fix though.

What a chunky looking beast-bot.

Snarl looks just as you would expect, well almost.  I was surprised that his tail has more grey on it than I thought it would.    It’s got the standard 80s style Stego mode, with a dragging tail, high hips and teeny tiny head.  The forelegs and head have my favourite clear plastic gold paint on this inside schtick going on and it looks (let’s say it together!) GREAT! The dino eyes and an Autobot symbol are painted on the outside and the application of the paint still allows you to clearly see the sculpting.  Of which there is a surprising amount.

Along the flank, there is some more details than before as the forelegs were covering it up, but still looks nice and the broad back doesn’t mean he is overly detailed.

Articulation wise his has ball jointed rear hips (coz they were the shoulders), swivel forelegs thigh swivels and hinged knees on the rear. 

Two of the plates can fold down revealing some TM/Prime robot head guys to stand on.  He also has some in the top if his hips if you want to keep these plates vertical.

Weapon mounting.

Sadly the dino mode is even worse for the mounting of weapons.  The plates along the back limit any options for making the armour seem like a weapons mount and the sword, well they generally look odd put anywhere on an animal mode.  So, we end up with the sword and the armour having to be mounted on the hips of the rear legs.  The sword looks odd….  Juts kind of hanging there.  The armour could be claimed to be reminiscent of the missile pod of the G1 toy, but it looks nothing like a gun and is a bit too big.  There is enough clearance underneath the head are of the beast mode, so it would have been nice to have the sword at least to be able to plug underneath there.

As a result, I have a tendency just to leave his accessories to the side while he’s in dino mode.   Even using Sixgun to beef him up doesn’t really look all that great as they just get in the way the moment you pose him.

In the end, the dino mode is about what I’d expect.  It’s not exceptional, but it is nice and tickles the nostalgia gland enough to get the job done.  He looks good by himself and he also looks good with the other Dinobots.  Mission success.



Overall Snarl is another nicely decent deluxe sized Dinobot.  Robot mode is a great update to his original form and Stegosaurus keeps the theme, although doesn't seem to make any great improvements.  The design and colour of both modes work well and the fact that he can also transform into a gestalt leg and arm doesn’t inhibit the robot mode.  In fact, I quite like the way they used the peg to colour the section which was the cockpit back on the g1 toy.


Recommended if you:
Like dinosaurs
Like dinosaur robots
Like the Dinobots
Like standard quality toys.


Get the Dinobots in the truck!







They don’t bloody fit!!