Amazon has an exclusive Transformers subline this year (called a "capsule" by Industry Insiders and also toy nerds) that's got some pretty inside-baseball stuff!  We don't know about most of the line officially yet, but the first two sets of toys are starting to ship from Hasbro Pulse.

The first to get to me is the Senator Shockwave and Data Clerk Orion Pax two-pack!  Yeah, that's right, before he was a one-eyed gun-armed logic lord, before he was cosplaying as a centaur, and before he was a one-eyed gun-armed logic lord again, he was just a regular-ass senator on pre-war Cybertron.  But (spoilers!) he ran afoul of the deep state or whatever and they punished him as an example by setting his brain to Logic Always All The Time and removing his face and a hand.  Would Hasbro ever make a toy of Shockwave from before he looked anything like Shockwave?  Apparently they would!

Senator Shockwave is a retooled (called "a partial" by Industry Insiders and also toy nerds) Siege Seeker/Starscream, with his shellformering wings removed and replaced with a pair of boxy thrusters.  Also he's got a new head (obviously), a new chest panel, and new little wings to plug into his arms.  The changes do help evoke Senator Shockwave pretty well, but there's a style clash between his rounded new parts and the boxy Siege robot they retooled him from.  He's no longer a shellformer, though, so that's pretty cool!

Data Clerk Orion Pax is a retool of Seige Hound into an early IDW Orion Pax design by Guido Guidi that was sort of the basis for the Thrilling 30 Orion Pax of... ten years ago.  Dang, I'm old.  That Orion Pax design was partially inspired by Don Figueroa's Stormbringer pre-Earth Optimus Prime design, and so through a happy little accident the toy also looks like pre-Earth IDW Orion Pax.  I mean, a little.  He's smaller and doesn't have the little double-barreled guns on his forearms and he doesn't have a mouth, but there's a correlation there.  

The set also de-cops IDW Orion Pax, because, yeah, in that version of the story, Optimus Prime started out as a police officer who eventually realized... hey, this is a corrupt system I'm working for!  Instead, this set establishes Orion Pax as his Aligned/Transformers Prime pre-war occupation, that of a data clerk.  

Anyway, this Hound-derived Orion Pax has a bunch of new parts (chest, head, windshield, feet, shins) and comes with an axe and Hound's rifle and "spare tire" piece.  Pax transforms the same way as Hound did, so he's not like Senator Shockwave's escape from land.

A NOTE: If you order this from Amazon, they seem to have mixed up the Shockwave/Pax and the corresponding Ratbat/Megatron sets?  The item numbers and prices are switched, and folks who ordered Shockwave/Pax from Amazon are receiving Ratbat/Megatron instead?  So, uh, look out for that.  I mean, if you order both, you'll be fine, but if you only wanted one set, there might be some imminent returning about to happen.

War for Cybertron: Siege "Stege" Shockwave is a toy that I'm disappointed in because of an expectation I had built up for myself.  Like, okay, Stege's thing is interchangeable armor parts that work with everybody else, right?  Cog comes apart and he fits on other guys.  And everyone has identical placement of 5mm ports all over their bodies.  Clearly Shockwave's Shockwave armor is going to be able to similarly fit on other Stege toys.  

This is not the case.

And so I'm a little grumbly about it.

  

You can... sort of fit Shockwave's Shockwave armor on Skytread/Flywheels.  But I think this is just by accident.  Everyone else's shoulders are just off from being able to fit his shoulder armor on by, like, millimeters.  It's frustrating.  There's always some different kind of ridge that keep things from connecting properly. 

I am denied giving everyone Shockwave armor by the smallest of technicalities.  I'm a little put out.

I mean, you can still give him Shockwave's platform gun shoes.  And you can peg his shoulder/arm thingers elsewhere, haphazardly, but it's not quite what I wanted.

Other than that, Shockwave is very ... serviceable!  He's like a scaled-down Masterpiece Shockwave, transformation-wise.  The barrel folds up on his back, connected by long stretch of plastic.  His legs break up and become "the handle" and the butt of "the spacegun."  And I put those in quotes because he's one of those "no it's not a gun it's a, uh, submarine" things.  You flip his altmode upside-down, the "handle" is now a command tower, and it's "a spaceship."  Then you can connect all his extra parts to this spaceship mode to make a bigger more spaceshippy mode.  It's a pretty nice bigger spaceship!  The smaller spaceship is, uh, a spacegun upsidedown.

You can also connect all his extra bits together to make a little Shockwave Head-shaped hoverplatform for Shockwave to stand on.

As per the rest of Stege, Shockwave's robot mode is intended to be in cartoon scale with the rest of the line.  Thus he's a head shorter than Megatron and Optimus Prime.  Cartoon Shockwave was a little shorter than the leaders in the original cartoon (and in the original comic on the rare occasion someone looked at the height charts).  

Also as per a lot of Stege, Shockwave is absolutely covered in detail.  Some would say... too much detail!  Shockwave's got a lot of stege on him, is all.  Just so much stege.  I've got astigmatism, which means I often have trouble with horizontal and vertical lines, so if I, like, don't focus too hard on Stege Shockwave I sometimes forget that he looks like he's covered in mecha-scabs.  Detail is fine but this detail is just so... homogeneous.  It's all the visual interest of a chicken tender.

I imagine he'd be pretty ugly if I had crystal clear vision.  

I really liked Masterpiece Shockwave, but wasn't entirely sold on the weird milky lavender color they did him in.  But no worry, TakaraTomy would release a newer version this year in the dark purple everybody wanted to begin with!  And for twice the price, because I guess it's exclusive to somewhere maybe, I dunno!  

So I sold my original MP Shockwave on eBay and put down for the new one.  

The review for this one is pretty simple: He's as great as I said the other one was, but purpler now!  

Okay, a wrinkle: His gray gun barrel backpack thinger is now painted.  And so it's a snugger fit into the purple backpack you can clasp over it to make him look more charater-model/original-toy accurate.  I think it might scrape a bit if you're not too careful.  

He also has his Decepticon logos tampographed on rather than there being a sticker sheet provided.  Which is fine for me, since they tampographed on the logos I wanted anyway.  

Anyway, PURPLER.  Better!  More expensive!  ... but a downpayment via selling the first one helps.

Gonna quickly scrawl this Masterpiece Shockwave review before I head out later today to the airport on my way to Seattle!  It's Emerald City Comicon weekend!  You can find me at booth 112 with Cyanide & Happiness.  It's also BotCon weekend, but I made my choice between the two.  I'm still gettin' the toys (through my buddy who's going), so I'll have them to talk about shortly after I get back... which explains why I gotta get this Shockwave post done first!  It won't happen if I have a bunch of new Beast Wars combiner guys!

Anyway, Shockwave.  At first you might think, man, what does a Masterpiece Shockwave bring new to the table?  Because, really, his show model isn't all that different from his original toy, and honestly his Masterpiece is about the same size as his original toy, and that original toy wasn't a complete loss when it came to articulation, and so you're left with a pretty close copy of a toy you might already have had for like 30 years.  

AND YOUR FIRST THOUGHT WOULD BE RIGHT, BUT WHO CARES, MASTERPIECE SHOCKWAVE IS PRETTY DAMN GREAT

I love this guy.  And admittedly a huge part of that is "I love Shockwave," but I swear the toy is objectively cool besides that.  He still transforms into a purple space gun, and he's still a one-eyed one-handed dude (unless you give him his alternate extra hand), and he's still electronic.  It's only lights this time instead of lights and sounds, but I'm pretty cool with just the lights.  I have twin boys.  I'll have enough toys that make noise soon enough.  The lights are real strong, too.  He really glows (and has separate batteries for his gun-mode light and his wrist-gun light).  

Masterpiece Shockwave transforms a little differently this time around.  I mean, it's 80% the same.  He puts his arms over his head and bends over.  You can't really change that if you want a Shockwave that looks like the original Shockwave in both modes.  But now the designers decided his barrel wouldn't be a separate piece you kept aside in robot mode.  Now there's a long die-cast arm that folds up and places the barrel on his back.  Meanwhile, the part of the gun that USED to be the part that USED to fold up on Shockwave's back folds down and bolsters up the bulk of Shockwave's legs so they aren't so half-a-gun-handle thin.  Oh, and there's a weird garage door of abs that slides down and covers up his trigger penis.  Other than these changes, it's the same transformation.

If you're upset that Shockwave's backpack is no longer purple and looks like his old gun barrel, there's a separate piece you can slip over the new backpack to make it look like the old backpack.  Pretty silly, admittedly!  But it also doubles as a stand for Shockwave in gun mode, so at least it has a secondary purpose.  Speaking of silly, Shockwave also comes with a small handheld version of himself in gun mode, because there was once an episode of the cartoon where Shockwave fired a small handheld version of himself.  As you do.  

And finally, Shockwave comes with a large assortment of various hands.  He's a got solid lavender hand and gun-hand.  He's got a solid lavender replacement hand for that gun-hand in case you want to revisit that one time he was drawn in the cartoon with both hands.  He's got a saluting right hand so he can salute.  And he has ALL OF THESE THINGS AGAIN also in translucent plastic to match the original toy and also facilitate the electronic lights.  There are choices, is what I'm saying.  Like how you can choose between stickers of the proper Decepticon logo and the dorky misdrawn one from the cartoon.  

Much ado has been made about Shockwave's purple coloring.  In some photos it's looked kinda pinkish, while some folks pine for the dark purple of the original toy.  I can tell you that in person, his color... well, it's hard to explain.  It's a very deep purple, but not a dark purple.  It's essentially Shockwave's color of purple from his old Action Master toy, but milkier.  I don't mean "milkier" in that it's whiter, but that it absorbs and reflects light in a certain way.  It... really absorbs light.  How the purple looks is drastically altered by the lighting ambience.  It's difficult to photograph.  Sometimes it looks really different just from photo to photo in the same lighting.  Hell, if you want him darker purple, just stand him in front of something black.  But regardless it's a real attractive color in person.  Like I said, it's deep.  It's like he's carved out of purple milk chocolate.  

My one annoyance with the toy is the head.  You need to pull up on it (and the neck/collarbone section) to lock it into place in robot mode, but there's a real good chance you'll take the head off the neck balljoint instead.  And then you spend time trying to get a head to pop back onto a balljoint that's affixed to a swinging hinged piece from which you can't hold in place.  You know how it is.  I recommend grabbing the head from all corners and pulling directly up, keeping the head looking forward, when you try to lock it in place.  That generally keeps the head from popping off first.  

Anyway, he's excellently articulated, and a waist swivel and an ab crunch is something I never really expected a G1 Shockwave toy to have.  And given how G1 Shockwave tends to appear in his original toy body in basically any G1 story more than any other guy (up until the RID ongoing title in IDW, for example), this toy feels like, more than many other Masterpieces, to be basically any G1 Shockwave.  He can be cartoon, he can be Marvel, he can be Dreamwave, he can be IDW.  

And it makes you wonder if Senator Shockwave also transformed into a flying laser gun.

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.  

Nobody wants a Deluxe Shockwave!  Shockwave is massive and powerful and awesome.  And so I'm pretty happy to get this new Beast Hunters Shockwave to take the place of my Fall of Cybertron Shockwave on my WFC/FOC/Prime shelf.  He's a Voyager!  He ain't a small Voyager either, considering he makes TFPrime Voyager Megatron look kinda puny.  Not sure what I feel about that, but whatcha gonna do.

Beast Hunters Shockwave is.... most Shockwave toys.  That is,  he's an amazing robot.  A fantastic robot.  And he transforms into... soomethiing.  I think the only Shockwave toy that transformed into an Actual Something was the Alternator.  Everything else has been, like, ray-gun-that-looks-like-a-folded-up-Shockwave or satellite-thing-that-looks-like-a-folded-up-Shockwave or tank-that-looks-like-Shockwave-with-a-turret-pegged-to-it.  BH Shockwave ain't any different.  He's an exceptional robot toy and he transforms into himself doing the splits.

Oh, it's not an overly-simple transformation, by any stretch.  It looks like it is, but there are lots of tiny little twists and turns.  His feet... slide forward at an angle, for example, I think so that they lie flush with the rest of his legs in tank mode, which in tank mode are... legs.  I guess there are tumbler-like wheels in his heels, but they're not terribly visible so it just looks like he has treads in the back and legs in the front.  His handed arm tucks underneath while his gun arm tucks overneath.  And there's some panel-rearranging with his chest and stuff....  Okay, it's kind of simple.

But, dammit, he's a great robot.  One of the rubber treads on his back unfurls and plugs into his cannon.  (The other tread is also rubber, despite not doing anything, which is some nice symmetry.)  What's the most glorious thing about this toy is the cannon.  You know those gimmicks where you push down on a lever and it causes something to spin and spin and spin until friction finally wins, eventually?  The cannon's one of those.  But, wait, there's more.  While it's spinning, the cannon is slowly opening and closing and also extending and retracting.  And while this is going on, you can peek inside the cannon through it's twirling gaps and see the missile launcher, fleetingly.  It's a fascinating contraption, and I can't stop making it do what it does.  I haven't even gotten to where I find out how that missile fires.  Why would I?  This is great.

anyway there's some beast stuff to plug into him so he looks all beast huntery the end

Apparently there were going to be more Jazzes than even I realized.

This was the second year I've attended the BotCon customization class.  Last year I got to make Animated Minerva, and I had fun, so I did my best to sign up this year, too, and somehow succeeded.  It's pretty difficult to get in!  There are very limited seats and they basically sell out between when the prereg form goes live and its announcement on Twitter.  God must be rewarding me for my general apathy towards Him.

Same as last year, we were given an unassembled toy still on the tree, with all the screws and bolts and pins necessary to put him together.  What's not same as last year is the level of difficulty involved.  Animated Minerva was pretty straightforward.  Jazz, meanwhile, is way more complicated.  He's got SPRINGS, man!  And large bolts that go through the entirety of his torso, requiring a dremel.  Certain things were wisely deemed too difficult for novices and were left to a small group of extremely patient helpers.  The first day, I've heard, was grueling.  The kits sent from Asia were constructed differently than the samples sent earlier, necessitating some reorchestrating of its assembly.  By the second day, when I was there, most of these things were ironed out.  I had an excellent time, despite the more difficult assembly.   It took me about seven hours from start to finish.  (Apparently some folks from Day One required upwards of twelve.)

Longarm began as a simple Classics Shockwave idea.  He was given a new head and a gun arm, constructed at home by the class's perennial organizer, Shawn Tessman, which completed the transformation from Purple Jazz to Alternators Shockblast homage.  The kit still came with the original head and hand, of course, because it's all on the original sprues, so this toy was given a secondary identity, that of Shattered Glass Longarm.  If you recall from Transformers Animated, Shockwave infiltrated the Autobots under the Longarm identity, and a similar thing was happening here.  There does seem to be some conflict between Shawn and the other BotCon folks on what specific Shockwave this guy represents, whether it be the Marvelverse one or Shattered Glass.  The included profile strongly suggests Marvelverse, but that'll likely be decided more definitively in any future fictional appearances he might make.

My only regret is that I had to take pictures of this guy for TFwiki, meaning I couldn't use the provided orange paint to do this guy up in Action Master colors.  That would have been sweet.
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So all of this Dark of the Moon toy review stuff has convinced one of my ad networks that my site is primarily astronomy-related. Which isn't, like, terrible, but I wonder if I type "Transformer" like 30 times, I can reverse that. Transformer! Action figures! Transformers 3! Toys! Shockwave! Optimus Prime! Megatron! Shokaract!  Lord Imperius Delirious!

Anyway.

Man, I want a Shockwave in Leader Class size! Though I don't rate my chances, even if there were Decepticon Leader Class toys planned. He feels like he fills the same slot as The Fallen's Voyager Class toy did, last movie. The Fallen was the big bad but never rated a larger toy, probably because he's, y'know, a villain who isn't Megatron.

So this is likely it, regardless.

Also like The Fallen, Shockwave transforms into a Cybertronic vehicle, though Shockwave's tank mode is a lot less "pile of robot mode parts in awkward sex pose" than The Fallen's jet-thing. Shockwave compacts into a pretty solid brick with a cannon and a blade on top. Everything pegs and slots together really solidly, too. Lots and lots of pegs and slots. You could smash him repeatedly into a wall and he'd stay together. (It does take a bit of excessive force to get him OUT of tank mode...)

The only really annoying thing about the tank is the rubber cord that runs from the tank cannon to... somewhere on the tank. It's supposed to plug somewhere, but the instructions aren't really helpful about where. It seems like it's SUPPOSED to plug into the very conspicuous 5mm peghole buried in the dead center of the vehicle, but... Well, the hole is mounted inside a barrel that's tilted a little to the right, which helps in robot mode, but in vehicle mode it just means the cord's not gonna want to fit very well. It wants to occupy the same space as the tank body, since the barrel's angling it into the tank itself. Grar.

Both the cannon and the blade can be removed, but I dunno why anybody'd want to.

Shockwave's assortment of purples are very pretty and metallic-ish. He's most beautiful purple logic-ruled emotionless mastermind ever. Which... doesn't exactly match what we've seen of him in promotional renders and the trailers, where he's basically gunmetal gray like every other Decepticon ever. But I'm pretty okay with the inaccuracy. He's neat-looking.

EDIT: Oh, hey, apparently Hasbro's putting up transformation demonstration videos.  Here's Shockwave's.  Neat.

EDIT 2: And also apparently I've been plugging  his wire in the wrong place, if the video's accurate.  Hrm.