Since I’m building in chronological order, I’ll be going through older kits first so standards will try to reflect that although I’ll still make some comparisons to more modern kits.
OOB, the colors it is molded in is pretty wrong. The sturm faust should be green, the blue should be blue and not this turquoise-green it comes in, and some greys are a bit wrong if you want to be picky with accuracy (e.g. shotgun should be a lighter grey). It’s completely missing the white on the antenna and shoulder spike which must use stickers to cover. The black “holes” on the shoulder and forearms are just molded in their respective grey and “blue” plastic and need to be filled in, or better yet, actually be holes if possible.
The legs can perform a 90 degree bend even with double jointed knees, but the ankle articulation is pretty bad as the way they did the ball joint is very restrictive. This hampers a lot of spread legged poses. While the claws on the feet can move down, since the foot is molded in one fixed pose, posing is also difficult because of it. The waist can rotate nicely and there is no ab crunch. The shoulder is connected by a ball joint in the shoulder to the socket of the torso. There’s enough leeway in the design to move the arms a fair amount, but because there is no swinging mechanism in the torso, it’s still limited in that regard to modern kits. The shoulder armor is attached to another ball joint to the arm itself so there’s some movement that can be made there too. The arms can bend almost 180 degrees with its double jointed elbows and curling arm position. It’s flexible enough to pull off the tucked under the shoulder weapon holding position in most cases. The head cannot look down due to its design, but can rotate left and right and look up by the neck joint’s placement. The eye camera can also be rotated left and right and easily accessible without needing to take off the helmet.
A huge plus with the kit is all the weapons it has, having 2 shotguns, each with a configuration for a stock or not, 2 bazookas, 2 sturm faust, 2 beam sabers, and its chain mine.The chain mine is pretty flexible, but only the last 6 mines have the latches and overall, each mine has no articulation to swing any out or in. The shotguns have a nice swinging iron sight to each of them. Due to the grips of each shotgun and old hands, however, its very difficult to have it hold them convincingly. The cockpit hatch can open to reveal a tiny pilot inside. The neck’s able to swing to make the head look up pretty well to replicate when its flying close to the ground. All the verniers are on ball joints and the two behind the legs can even extend out.
The kit has an inner frame in its forearms, torso, and legs, but its thighs and upper arms are hollow. Because of all this, its pretty light for its girth and is prone to tipping over if not planted firmly. The curling forearm its molded with is pretty bad and makes you try to pose around it without looking weird. I personally think being able to tilt the head down is a big deal and not having that sucks. For its time, of the ones I’ve built, it’s definitely an improvement in a lot of areas though. Its proportions alone make it better to me than the bootleg third party version too.
Tons of weapons, striking silhouette, decent articulation in upper body
Articulation suffers with lower body, hands are awkward with shotguns, very light causing balancing issues, neck/head articulation could be better
It’s ok for its time. It could use a ver. 2.0 but is very serviceable as is.