More guys who had no toys but were created in the comics just to die!

This is Impactor, Marvel UK's leader of the Wreckers.  Decades ago, I would have had to explain who he is to essentially everybody, as well as what the "Wreckers" are, but after both entities were ported over into the IDW comics (and after the Wreckers were a staple of BotCon fiction before that), they're not quite the unknowns they were in the United States that they once were.

In the original Marvel UK Transformers stuff, Impactor was the upright and outstanding leader of the Wreckers, an Autobot special missions task force that was made up of all the left-over toys that couldn't fit anywhere else.  He died heroically, Springer (a real toy!) took over, and Springer spent the rest of his days lamenting that he would never be as good a leader as Impactor was.  With a quick interruption, of course, when Impactor was 

resurrected as a zombie and sacrificed himself AGAIN to save the day heroically AGAIN.  Impactor was Dinobot before Dinobot was cool.  

In the current IDW comics, Impactor was still the former Wreckers leader, but because he was killed, but because he was disgraced.  You see, maybe leading a team of "we do the dirty work so you get to keep your hands clean" red-shirt commandos is probably mentally taxing?  Probably?  Anyway, modern Impactor is a little more anti-hero than the original.  He was jailed for war crimes, but now he's out and about and trying/failing to live up to Springer's more-heroic example.  It's the ol' switcheroo!  

And now he has a toy!  Well, sort of his second toy.  Depends on how your brain categorizes these things.  Fall of Cybertron gave us an Impactor toy, but that Impactor technically belonged to the Aligned (Transformers Prime) universe, not Generation 1.  But like that toy, this Impactor is a head-retool of a combining figure.  And as a plus, he's actually in Impactor's colors, rather than having them inverted and changing his yellow to orange.  Also, this time he's a GOOD TOY?  Like, Rook is easily the best Deluxe of the Combiner Wars line.  He can do everything everyone else can do plus he has the ability to have Hulk Hands and he has articulated feet.  Thus I welcome our new Impactor overlord.

In addition to the new head, Combiner Wars Impactor comes with Generations Arcee's arsenal of weaponry.  You might think at first that this is pretty weird, since all these weapons really only work with Arcee, who doesn't have 5mm peghole hands.  Well, turns out they work fine with Impactor, too!  The tabs are 5mm across, so they can fit into his wrist-gun pegholes fine enough, plus there's like a field of slots on his backpack that just so happen to accomodate the onslaught of tabs that Arcee's weapons possess.  So there you go.  

Really, the only negative this toy has is that it's a little short to be a perfect Impactor toy.  Impactor should, in a perfect world, be the next size class up.  But otherwise, this is a great Impactor made from a great toy.  In that respect, he's very satisfying.

I've nurtured a boner for these guys as soon as we learned about them from last year's Comic-Con.  I'd expected them to come out last spring, but after a few-months delay instead they arrived on my doorstep (via BBTS) the afternoon after I left for BotCon.  THE AGONY!  And I've really wanted to talk about them since, but I made myself go through a bunch of BotCon stuff first.

I'm gonna focus mostly on Impactor today.  He's the first toy we've gotten of the character since he debuted in the pages of Marvel UK's Transformers comic over 25 years ago as the soon-to-be-late leader of the Wreckers.  He was more of a tough-but-noble guy then, mostly because it supplied an impossible standard to live up to for the next Wreckers leader, Springer.  Like Dinobot, he came back as a shadow of his former self while still managing to save the day one more time with yet one more sacrifice.  Again.  Impossible standard.  Sorry, Springer!  He was reintroduced to Transformers in Last Stand of the Wreckers, where he was recast as an example of what millions of years of war can really do to a guy, especially one charged with leading a bunch of violent under-the-radar misfits like the Wreckers.  He's a stubborn and broken dude, having snapped, committed a war crime, and landed himself in Prison For Super Evil People.  He's supplies a different standard for that continuity's Springer to measure himself up against.

One of the reasons we haven't gotten an Impactor over the years is that he's a purple Autobot.  Hasbro's not big on purple Autobots.  So I guess this one's orange and dark blue!  Problem solved?  He's also a retool of FOC Onslaught, which is a double-edged sword.  It means his arms are kind of meh (the ball-joints are weak) and his alt-mode is double-meh (just meh all over) but it does mean that he forms the torso of a super Wreckers combiner.  Oh baby.  Seriously, he's the center of a fangasm made plastic.  Impactor has a trademark weapon arm (usually a harpoon), and this toy tries to duplicate that best it can with the materials provided.  Without any weapons attached, he's just got two normal arms.  He comes with a giant harpoon missile launcher weapon which he can hold, but that's not quite there yet.  HOWEVER, you can snap Onslaught's gun and the harpoon weapon together around the fist, concealing it, giving an impression that he does have an arm that ends in a weapon, albeit a very large one.

As a special and sort of weird bonus, the head of the combiner is based on Emirate Xaaron, the diminutive former politician and Autobot Underground Resistance Movement Figurehead who advised the Wreckers in the Marvel UK stuff.  So... if you waaaaaaant to, you could pull out that head while Impactor is in robot mode and pretend you have a big-noggined Xaaron toy with scoliosis.  You could!  If you wanted to!  Two former toyless guys get a toy all in one go!

Also of special note is the Wreckers faction symbol on the combiner mode's chest.  The blue hammer-headed Autobot logo hasn't seen the light of day since 3H's Wreckers comics over a decade ago.  You have no idea how happy its resurgence makes me.

Look, I have a lot of toys to talk about, but we have to get this little thing out of the way first.  In the "Are We Sure This Isn't A BotCon Exclusive Idea?" Department, Hasbro's retooling Fall of Cybertron Bruticus as, well, the Wreckers.  The torso is now Impactor, with a new Impactor head and a new handheld harpoon gun.  Impactor's never gotten a toy before.  He was a Marvel UK-only character that recently got new exposure in Last Stand of the Wreckers.  The limbs are the Jumpstarters and the Deluxe Autobots.  Topspin and Twintwist haven't gotten new toys since 1985.  Roadbuster and Whirl have had plenty of new toys since then, but none with their actual heads.

And the head of this combiner, dubbed Ruination, is based on Emirate Xaaron, another previously non-toy guy.

And and the chest of Ruination has the old BotCon Wreckers logo, the blue Autobot symbol with the hammer forehead.
Plus with a dark blue helicopter, a green jeep, a light blue tank, and a white shuttle, the toy seems to serve as an homage to Robots in Disguise Ruination as well, with the orange/golden chest of the Car Robots version seen in the animation.  This thing is an homage within an homage baked inside another  homage.  An homage turducken.

Seriously, what in the hell.  Mind, this is a good "what in the hell," but what in the hell regardless.

My only reservations are that Xaaron is not the best head choice for a giant combiner thingy of murder.  He was a politician at worst and a resistance movement figurehead at best.  But still.  Xaaron head.  It's hard to complain.  (Plus no matter what continuity we're talking about, at least two of these guys are dead.)

But, yeah.  I will buy this.  I will lick it.  It makes no sense, but I don't care.  Rule of Cool overrides all else.  Why is it not next spring yet, I put to you folks.  I think TFWiki needs a new category for "Things That Should Not Be Normal Retail Releases Yet Somehow Are."