Newsflash:  I am, like, super into Combiner Wars.  I want every Transformer already in my collection to be redone as a Combiner Wars limb or torso or accessory, I don't care if it means I would then own six hundred Dead End retools, I am up for it.  

So imagine my interest in Combiner Wars combined (get it?) with my love for Beast Wars, and you've got this Predacus guy.  And then imagine my interest in Ravage combined with both of those two things already, and, yeah, this BotCon 2016 set is in my wheelhouse.  Because Ravage is in it.  Hell, the first thing we saw was Ravage, and I was sold.  Everything else could have been soggy dead puppies and it still would have been a great set, because at least one part of it was a Ravage who could become an arm or a leg.

Ravage himself is a Combiner Wars-style recreation of his appearance in the Beast Wars cartoon, crossed with his Alternators toy where he was a robot with a jaguar head who transformed into a black sports car.  You have no idea how much my jam that is.  All of my jam.  Ravage is Breakdown with a new kitty head.  A very flat, as seen from the side, kitty head.  What I'm saying is he has no back of his skull.  It's like the Invisible Man is wearing a Halloween mask of Ravage's face.  

But it's okay.  I don't care.  It's Ravage as a Combiner Wars limb.

I may be somewhat biased.

Ravage's partner leg is Tarantulas, who's Combiner Wars Rook with a new head.  We just got a vehicle-mode-style Tarantulas last year who's essentially perfect, which would in most cases make this new vehicle-mode-style Tarantulas surplus to requirements, but you forget that I want all characters ever to be able to be a limb or a torso, so he's still desired.  He's a Tarantulas who can become an arm or a leg.  He's a want.

The other three, now, these guys are interesting!  They're the Tripredacus Council from "The Agenda (Part 1)," also known as "that time that it was really cool that Beast Wars started connecting itself to G1 a little but then fandom started thinking that connecting BW to G1 was what BW was all about and then we never got anything else out of new Beast Wars fiction ever."  Ahem.  But I digress.  The Tripredacus Council!  We've never got toys of them as they've appeared on the cartoon, as they were essentially three random robot dudes who got randomly assigned names from the components of Tripredacus, the Predacon Beast Wars combiner.  But here they are, and they turn into vehicles, because they aren't beasts right now/yet.  

Ram Horn is the guy on the show who had little wings on his head and whose face was made mostly of Rattrap's, but with a nose.  He's got a new head and that head sits atop Brawl/Nosecone.  Combiner Wars Brawl/Nosecone is not that great of a toy, but I guess it's an appropriate use, nonetheless.  Ram Horn was a rhinoceros beetle, and so using a tank with a drill is kind of evocative of that kinda beasty shape.  

Cicadacon is the guy on the show who had Megatron's face incased inside a DEVO hat with little horns.  Sadly, his Combiner Wars toy does not have his own new head, and he's the only toy in the combiner that doesn't have a new head!  It makes me a little sad.  He's just Skydive with no sculpting alterations, and while he has the same general shape for his helmet, he lacks the little horns and most importantly he lacks the Megatron face.  I need that triangle nose, man!  

Sea Clamp is the guy on the show who had a head that looked like somebody had five minutes to extrude a CGI block into something resembling a face and then somebody else's mouth was pasted onto the chin.  Sea Clamp's original toy was a lobster, hence the name, but Combiner Wars doesn't have much in the way of sea vehicles.  Or any sea vehicles.  But he's Scattershot, who's a spaceship thing, and maybe you can pretend spaceship things are sea vehicles, right?  He has a new head.

He also has another new head in his tummy for the combined mode, Predacus.  Ravage and Tarantulas become the legs and the Tripredacus Council becomes everything above the knees.  You'd think, seeing three red guys and one black guy and one dark blue guy, that he'd look a little mismatched, but honestly he looks pretty great.  There's Tarantulas and Ravage's colors duplicated on the combiner chest, and they want you to swap the red and black fist/foot/weapons with each other so that there's a better scattering of colors, and it basically works.  He's a very attractive combiner.  His new head is based on Tripredacus's, of course.  

My complaints:  Some plastic tolerance issues!  Sometimes their fist/foot/guns don't fit securely into the wrist or ankle pegholes.  You can have hands drop off the arms and it's annoying.  Also, man, Brawl/Nosecone is not a great toy.  He's the weak link in this chain of robots.  And, yeah, Ravage is missing his brain.  Whatevs, I don't look at him from the side anyway, and really the limp wrists and Brawl are more of an annoyance than that.  There's also unfortunately the comic book he comes with but let's keep this a happy place in the wake of a very important day.

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the first airing of the Beast Wars cartoon pilot on syndication!  I watched it on television that day, like after school or something.  Because of course I did.

The only thing better than giving us pre-beast toys of the rest of the original Beast Wars Predacon crew is giving us those pre-beast toys in Combiner Wars form.  Terrorsaur mostly delivers on this!  For some reason he doesn't come with his hand/foot/gun, so you have to borrow somebody else's.  Or you can end up with a combiner with a limp, I dunno.

But, yeah, Terrorsaur satisfies me.  We got pre-beast Megatron, Waspinator, and Dinobot way back in 2006, and then pre-beast Tarantulas nine years later in 2015.   With Terrorsaur here, we're just one original Predacon down, and Scorponok is promised from the Figure Subscription Service before the end of the year!   Huzzah.

Combiner Wars Terrorsaur is in his cartoon deco, rather than the original toy deco which replaced the silver and other silver with black and purple.  As such, Terry's a little less vibrant than some may remember him, but the silver and charcoal, with the edges here and there of orange, do manage to keep him visually interesting.   

He's got a new headsculpt which is... well, it's goofy-looking, but in a way that Terrorsaur kind of looked all the time.  Those first few Beast Wars CGI models were kind of rudimentary.  This toy gives him a kind of awkward toothy grin, like he's stifling a chuckle after a fart, but honestly that's not too far off-character.  

Combiner Wars Terrorsaur is also essentially perfectly scaled to his fellow pre-beast Predacon pals, as best as he can be, anyway.  Tarantulas is an abberation, being so tall, but otherwise CW Terrorsaur clocks in at just shorter than Dinobot and quite a bit taller than Waspinator and waaaaaaay shorter than Megatron.  These are all correct Nerd Measurements.  If pre-beast Tarantulas weren't done so perfectly I'd be more resentful of his size screwing up the otherwise perfect scale.

When I was a little boy of about ten years old, there came into existence the crazy idea that maybe Hasbro should make new versions of old popular Transformers characters, because maybe kids had grown attached to Transformers as people and not entirely just as a gimmick.  And so we got Optimus Prime as a Powermaster and Jazz and Bumblebee and Starscream and Grimlock as Pretenders.  And I realized... wait, we can get OLD guys as NEW guys???  I can have chances to buy all the guys I didn't manage to get in 1984?  

Strange new possibilities awoke in me, and I designed a combiner (because old guys come back as special features like Powermasters or Pretenders) that was made up of a bunch of 1984 guys I wanted to have toys of.  Ratchet, Ironhide, Wheeljack, and Prowl combined with Optimus Prime (because of course the torso would be Optimus Prime, duh doy) to form a bigger robot.  Ratchet and Ironhide would finally have toys that had heads like they did in the comics, and Wheeljack and Prowl were just other guys I wanted because they were important in the early Marvel stuff I had.  (Essentially, I was recreating the Autobot cast of "DIS-Integrated Circuits!" minus the Jazz I already had a Pretender of, plus Ironhide who I thought needed a toy with a head.)  

WELL HEY GREAT NEWS!  Combiner Wars gave us all those guys, true to my ten-year-old self's designs.  Well, minus Ratchet.  We knew there was a possible Ratchet head for the Combiner Wars First Aid toy hidden somewhere in the tooling, but would Hasbro put out a SECOND nigh-identical white-with-red ambulance guy?  Sometimes Hasbro just puts alternate heads into tooling for a rainy day and then never actually uses them.  Would my childhood fanfic combiner never fully come to be?

Screw y'all, 'cuz it has!  ...by the skin of its teeth!  Hasbro told BotCon, HEY, you guys use our Ratchet tooling for your customization class toy, all right?  And BotCon was all, yes daddy.  And, lo, the childhood was saved.  

But, jeez, is my Ratchet cup runneth over.  Shawn Tessmann, who runs the customization class, came up with FIVE seperate ways to paint up your Ratchet, and four of them are awesome.  There's the red-headed Marvel Ratchet that I was always going to make no matter what, there was the cartoon-style version (no thank you!), there was an amazing-looking neonish G2 Ratchet, there was a Shattered Glass Ratchet, and there was a fifth option where you use the First Aid head that remained on the sprue to make Medix, the Rescue Bots-inspired additional member of the Protectobots.  

I had preordered two Ratchets, one to paint and one to keep around just in case because RATCHET, but now I kind of have a deficit of Ratchets to make into the other possibilities.  In time, I tell myself, in time.  For now, I have this lone Marvel-style Ratchet.  He makes me supremely happy!  Frankly, red-headed Ratchet makes me happy in general, as if it's a load-bearing Jenga piece of my soul.  And thanks to some very good friends and also eBay, I have everything needed to complete him -- stickers, Enigma of Combination, and all.

(is there anything more really required in life than good friends and eBay?)

(okay, there's also Amazon.com)

Like last year's Covenant of Primus, the Enigma of Combination is a sort-of-not-really-Hasbro-blessed fan-made accessory to go with the customization class toy.  Ratchet can hold it and also it can plug into Optimus Prime's combiner mode chest.  ...way better than Blackjack or Rodimus, I can tell you.  

So, at long last, my childhood combiner is complete.  I will likely keep Ratchet as an arm, because he's special to me and I can see him better that way on a shelf, rather than hiding as a leg behind something else on display.  His translucent combiner fist is supposed to be all Healy Powers anyway, and I imagine it's probably rough to try to kick someone into health.    

I keep wanting to say, "one of the best BotCon toys this year," but honestly, they're all pretty damn great, so unless they all get to tie for second and first place, I dunno.  But this Airazor?  It's a pretty good toy of Airazor!  If you don't mind that she's not a bird!

Combiner Wars Airazor (she doesn't combine) is a redeco of Slipstream who herself was a heavy retool of Windblade.  There's no changes to Slipstream's sculpt, just a different deco, and yet it works pretty damn well as Airazor.  The head is painted up to kind of resemble Airazor's beaky bird hat, the fake sculpted cockpit on her chest is a reasonable vehicleish facsimile of a falcon's head, and the whole brownish-black/tan/yellow/extrayellow thing going on with her, with the dash of translucent green, is pretty fancy.  It's not a group of colors you see together a lot in Transformers, if ever, especially since the retail line has been kinda overwhelmingly White And Red for the past year as Combiner Wars has retreaded 1986.  Whoever designed the deco on this toy, good job.  

I don't reeeeally want to get into the convention comic in which Airazor featured right here, right now, because, again, as I said, there would be swearing.  

So let's instead say this is superfab Airazor bein' all jetty in the years following her enigmatic disappearance following the events of Primeval Dawn!  Let's unfridge her.  Yup, she's returned from the distant past to the less-distant future, maybe to participate in some Universe wars or something.  It could be fun!  Think of all the adventures she could have, y'know not being a super important Autobot from the end of the Great War or anything like that.

That'd be ridiculous.

Anyway, she technically replaces the other Airazor-as-a-jet-instead-of-a-bird exclusive toy we got a decade ago, which is a replacement that is FINE BY ME.  Timelines Airazor is, like, one of the worst things ever, and I own her because I am dumb.  First of all, she's the Energon Slugslinger toy, and Energon Slugslinger is terrible.  Like, it's one of those infamous Toys That Hate You.  There is no love for humanity in its engineering.  It was designed to snuff out your life force.  Now, imagine that toy with an Airazor head and at exclusive limited-run prices and representing a fundamental misunderstanding of the character herself.

But there's a better one now.  You can bury the other in the back yard or maybe set it on fire.

Every year at BotCon, invariably there's an exclusive toy that really feels like somebody was saying, "hey, what's some cracked-out shit that Walky kid would like?" Well, this is this year's.  This is Under-3.

Under-3 was a McDonald's Happy Meal toy way back in the early Beast Wars days.  He wasn't part of the regular assortment, but a very simplified toy with minimal moving parts that was intended for children under the age of three.  Hence the name.  "Under-3" was printed on his baggy in the same space that the names for the other guys went.  He was a lion head that flipped open like a clam to reveal a robot sculpted inside that looked kinda like Optimus Prime/Primal.  That's it.

Bogglingly, a toy based on him is part of this year's BotCon offerings.  He's a strait redeco of Combiner Wars Streetwise, meaning instead of transforming into just a head, now he can transform into just an arm or just a leg.  And a yellow police car, but whatever.  His name is "Unit-3" on his profile card because I don't know.  The point is, that's just a callsign he uses, so his real name could easily be "Under-3."  That's what really matters.  Renaming Under-3 something else puts you on my shit list.  

He's a very striking-looking toy, making him easily one of the best exclusive toys available this year -- and that's in the company of TM3 Megatron.  He loses a little of the charm of the original toy (well, a lot of the original charm) by not transforming into a disembodied lion head, but I think being a new toy of that crazy-ass Happy Meal dude is its own separate charm.  He's Under-3.  For adults.

don't talk to me about the comic he appeared in just yet, there would only be swears

It's my burfday!  Let's talk about this sweet burfday present I got from my pal Cho.  HI CHO.

anyway, it broke, like, immediately, and had to have it replaced, but that took only like two days because AMAZON PRIME and so no huge bigs

(it's silverbolt's fist, it snapped unfixably when i tried to turn it on its wrist hinge for combined mode, crumbling like so much old cheddar cheese)

BESIDES THAT Combiner Wars G2 Superion is a pretty great recreation of the original Generation 2 Superion.  It doesn't copy its color scheme off a fan work based off another fan work or anything!  As far as we can tell, Hasbro actually did this deco themselves, based on the original toys.  Amazing, I know.   So if you remember G2 Superion, who wasn't canceled like 4/5ths of G2 Menasor was, then you basically know what you're getting here, Air Raid's Spider-Man wing deco and all.

Superion also comes with a redeco of Powerglide in "what-if" Generation 2 colors, since Powerglide wasn't otherwise in Generation 2.  They inverted his colors, basically, just like G2 Sideswipe's were, and there you have it.  

Like Menasor who came with Wildrider instead of Offroad, Superion comes with Slingshot instead of that helicopter guy Alpha Bravo.  So Superion is all jets once again.  I'm of two minds on this.  My first mind's all "oh man but Alpha Bravo is kinda cool and he's a new guy and it's nice that they're not ALL jets, for, like, variety."  My second mind's all "hooray, a new G2 Slingshot that won't crumble to dust!"

You see, G2 Slingshot was made of that notorious "gold plastic" which disintegrates under a light breeze.  Eventually.  It will happen.  It's inevitable.  The chemical composition of the plastic, with its swirly glittery whateverness is what does the deed, I believe.  But this new Slingshot is not made out of that kind of gold plastic.  There's no swirls, it's just kinda a flat gold color.  It should be safe.  Hasbro promised us Slingshot would be safe.

Note they promised absolutely nothing about Silverbolt.

Quickly: So, like, in the Nineties there was almost a Generation 2 Menasor, but he was canceled and BotCon got to have one-fifth of him as an exclusive, the rest being limited to a small handful of samples, causing him to be amazingly valuable.  

But now there's a Combiner Wars giftset that does Menasor in his G2 colors (sort of), so everyone can have one now!  Hooray!  And mine was an early birthday gift!  Yay, thanks, Scott!  

Combiner Wars G2 Menasor is one slick package.  I mean, obviously, you get all these guys at once, rather than having to get them piecemeal in stores or online, and so that's good.  You open up the box and you see everything all arranged there in a plastic tray, and life is good.  Also inside the box is a large paper envelope, which contains your instructions, a collectors card, and a cardstock-quality poster of Menasor.  ....well, G1 Menasor, not G2 Menasor.  But it's still friggin' cardstock paper inside an envelope, so.  None of that floppy thin paper nonsense, this is the fancy stuff.

I have some quibbles though.  From all appearances, the deco on this toy was taken from some guy's DeviantArt digital mockup.  (to the point that the official Transformers Facebook account used his mock-ups exactly in a promotional image, including the yellow Offroad you don't get in the set)  That's kinda shady.  And it also means we get a Breakdown with purple and silver instead of pink and gold, since I guess the DeviantArt mockup guy was working off this fan-painted version of the canceled G2 Stunticons and not the BotCon version people actually know.  

Also, if you're expecting Blackjack to be at all snug when connected to Menasor's chest, don't.

That said, this set is a pretty good deal, especially if you don't have any of these guys yet.  You get six brightly-colored toys for $100 (or less, as Amazon inevitably drops it a few bucks like they did Superion) that combine into a robot and visually emulate a toy 99.999999999999999% of Transformers collectors can't ever own.  Plus, y'know, the poster.  I have no idea why I love that poster so much, but I do.   You may love the poster less.

If you're dead inside.

Sky Lynx!  When we were kids, my little brother really really wanted Sky Lynx.  Like, he had an incalculable yearning.  I mean, think about it: Sky Lynx was a shuttle that split into a lynx and a bird, and the lynx and the bird combined into a dragon.  Oh, and it could walk.  You put in batteries and the damned thing walked by itself.  You can see the appeal, right?

So then I got Sky Lynx for my birthday from our grandparents.  I opened the thing up in front of my poor brother.  Back then, my grandparents liked to get a smaller present for the Other Sibling (our sister was not born yet or was too young to care) on the other's birthday so they wouldn't feel completely left out because that's the kind of spoiling-riffic stuff you can do as a grandparent, and so there is this amazing photo of my brother limply pointing to his also-ran BraveStarr toy he opened up that day, a very visible inner brokenness deepset within his face.

Decades later, I'd buy him the Japanese reissue.  It was the least I could do.

But this Sky Lynx is mine!  His shuttle mode no longer splits up into lynx and bird modes, instead going straight to dino-dragon, and obviously he doesn't self-walk anymore.  He does, however, become a torso for Combiner Wars limbs to connect to and become Sky Reign.  Not a terrible trade-off.  

Space shuttles -- at least the ones we sent up into space for years -- aren't a thing anymore, being all retired and whatnot, and so probably relatedly Sky Lynx is a very liberal interpretation of one.  He's got little forward-swept wings on his back end.  He's got a weird pattern of windows and little tiny wing horns near the cockpit.  The crawler-transporter is still there, and since Sky Lynx is no longer a proper real-life shuttle, I guess it's actually now just a part of his generic space shuttle mode.  As mentioned above, it does not detach.  It's not even all connected down there in the middle, so even if you tried disassembling the toy you'd have a scattering of disjointed blue parts.

Though in dragon mode Sky Lynx no longer walks, he does have a little more articulation than before.  His forelegs (not the back) can splay outwards.  He's got bicep and thigh swivels, and you can move them yourself without breaking the toy, like you were liable to in the 80s.  I swear, that old plastic was made from crusty old cheese.  The original toy had a few joints in his neck (necessary for transformation), but I don't think it could look to and fro, so that's new.  Out the back, just barely, is a tiny version of his original tailfin-ended tail.  It's barely visible from most angles, but I'd say it's vestigial.  Attach the two sword weapons to it, and you get a properly-lengthed tail.  The original tail is probably there just for purists.

The torso mode is where you find this toy's only real deficiency.  Unlike the other torsos in Combiner Wars, Sky Lynx's shoulders do not seem to secure in any way, and so you have to hold them in place while you articulate his arms or else the shoulders move with them.  But this mode is where his lynx head ended up, so you kind of forget this annoyance when you behold his splendor.  

The two swords combine into a longer sword, because of course they do.

 *finally climbs out of a pile of babies*

Look, I have new toys!  New Combiner Wars toys!  I don't have these guys' torso yet, but let's talk about the limbs.  They're wave six of the Deluxe Class guys, aka The Final Wave.  I mean, there's still a buttload of more box sets coming out through the rest of the year, but these are the last single-packed guys before Combiner Wars gets transitioned into Titans Return (aka Everyone Is A Headmaster).

Wheeljack is the most changed of these four.  Though he used to be Breakdown, he's had his entire car mode replaced and most of his robot mode as well.  He's 90% new toy, though he transforms exactly the same and has all the same functionality.  I'm happy for the vehicle mode reshelling the most, because I just kinda feel like Wheeljack needs to look like a Lancia Stratos, moreso than most other Autobot cars need to be their original car model.  I mean, it's cool that he has new robot parts, too, but that feels like extra on top of a necessity.

In between promo renders and the final product, some of Wheeljack's black plastic is now white, like his crotch and elbows.  This is not helpful, since he was kinda too-white already!  And so now he's really white.  Don't get me wrong, he has a lot of paint -- Wheeljack kind of has to have a lot of paint, since he's got a distinctive rally deco, but all his budget went into creating that, so you don't get a lot of the small stuff like having painted forearms and whatnot.  S'okay, I'll paint a lot of that stuff myself later.

Second, let's just get Smokescreen out of the way.  He's a straight redeco of Prowl.  Like Wheeljack, he uses up all his paint budget in his vehicle mode's rally deco, and so his robot mode's a little plain.  Smokescreen's a little frustrating, because we know there are other unused heads on these guys that might not make it to retail (coughcoughRatchetcoughcough) but I guess Hasbro proooobably wanted a race car instead of a second white-and-red ambulance.  S'okay, Ratchet's likely this year's BotCon customization class guy anyway.

Hound is Swindle with a new Hound head!  Swindle himself was a heavy retool of Rook in the same way that Wheeljack is a retool of Breakdown -- aka, it's all new except for a crotch and a peg and some tiny joints here and there.  In addition to Hound's new head, his smaller weapon now has nubs on the back so that it can be shoved into the rollbar cage on his robot mode back, giving him an over-the-shoulder weapon.  (Some later versions of Swindle reportedly have this as well.)   Over-the-shoulder weapon pleases me!  

Where Hound is frustrating is how they deco him.  He's got, like, two separate vehicle fronts sculpted on his torso.  Up top on his chest is one set of fake vehicle front, and then there's a separate set of fake vehicle front on his stomach.  This is so he can do double duty as both Hound and Swindle provided you illuminate the right parts with paint.  However, the right parts were not illimunated with paint!  Hound has his Swindle parts painted, ignoring completely the Hound bumper across his ribcage, while those Swindle parts were ignored on Swindle.  Grrrr!   Maybe I'll do some painting on Hound as well.

And finally there's Trailbreaker, who even-more-finally has his own original name back.  Hasbro tried to make so many Trailbreakers over the years, realized they didn't have the trademark but weren't willing to find a new one, and so we got a lot of black Ironhides.  And so finally, a year or two ago they were all FINE, dubbed him "Trailcutter," put out a few Trailcutter toys, and even got Trailbreaker to change his name to Trailcutter in the IDW comics.  And then Trailcutter died.  And now they got "Trailbreaker"-the-Trademark back for real and so I guess they can give his proper name to his corpse.  

Poor Trailbreaker.

Trailbreaker has a few retoolings, but not nearly as many as Wheeljack.  He's got a new head, obvs, but he's also got new forearms and new fingers on his combiner mode fist.  One of his new forearms ends in a hand and the other ends in a gun, as Trailbreakers do, but they made the end a 5mm peghole so you can shove his combiner mode fist in there.  Sweet.  His combiner mode fist now has kind of a claw thing going on instead of fingers, which is super neat.  Well, it'd be super neater if this tooling got used a second use (as Hoist?) so you could give a combiner robot double claw hands, but whatcha gonna do.  (Other than buy a second Trailbreaker.)  

Trailbreaker's new claw things give me pause, though.  The fronts of the claw are painted, which is... weird.  Other than dipping the whole damn thing in silver, like with the Optimus Maximus guys, these hand/foot weapons don't really get paint, and they certainly don't get spot paint.  I have this feeling that the silver finger fronts are meaningful in some way, but I can't find any new way for the weapon to interact with the robot mode.  I mean, obviously, the first thing you think of is Trailbreaker's silver forcefield generator which usually goes over his head, but you can't shove this weapon behind Trailbreaker's head any better than any other version of the mold.  (ie, terribly)  I dunno.  It's gonna bug me.  

There's three base toolings for Combiner Wars Voyager Class toys so far (with a fourth, Sky Lynx, on the way), and Hot Spot was by far the best of them.  So I'm similarly happy with Onslaught, who is a reworking of Hot Spot.  Hot Spot was lithe and dynamic and sturdy in all the ways that matter, and Onslaught takes all these fundamentals inherent in the tooling and nudges them in a different direction.

Onslaught keeps a lot of the same parts, like the basic torso framework and most of his arms and legs, but now he transforms backwards from the way Hot Spot did -- his legs now become the back of the vehicle and his arms become the front.  The extended armature with Defensor's combiner robot chest-and-head parts is replaced with something a little more simple.  There's just rotating and unfolding involved in Bruticus's combiner kibble, rather than also wrapping around, but that's fine.  It accomplishes what you want it to.  It looks like Bruticus's chest and head in combiner mode, stashes away behind Onslaught in robot mode, and (in its weakest iteration) becomes the weapon placement in armored truck mode.  If the two cannons aren't enough for you, there're also pegholes to attach Combiner Wars Shockwave, who also becomes Bruticus's handheld weapon.  

It's a pretty perfect Onslaught and pushes all of the Onslaught buttons I can imagine, which is fairly impressive for a toy that's mostly Hot Spot.  After a few new parts and a reversed transformation (and a slightly altered combiner torso formation) and you've got everything you'd want.  He can even peg his cannons into the kibble on his back to complete his original silhouette.

He's just very satisfying.

Way back at BotCon earlier this year, Hasbro said that Onslaught was going to have a running change -- first his combiner parts were going to be tan plastic (to make a better Onslaught) and later they'd be silver (to make a better Bruticus).  It kind of seems like they've skipped the tan plastic version entirely, and maybe it's because everyone in the world said they'd be waiting for the running change with the silver.  Honestly, Onslaught doesn't need the tan parts to look like Onslaught.  Who cares if he has a bunch of silver stuff in the middle of his armored truck mode instead of tan?  It's a worthy compromise to get the better-looking combiner mode.