Name: Omega Supreme
Series: Energon
Allegiance: Autobot
Alternate Mode: Battleship, Mining Vehicle
Thanks to Morkus for loaning me Omega Supreme, making this review possible (I have since acquired Omega Supreme).
BATTLESHIP MODE
Height: 13cm Length: 44cm Width: 10cm
A dark blue battleship with some yellow, red and silver here and there. The bridge is black with small metallic blue windows, and there are four black deck gun emplacement with two guns each. The front half has a silver deck and the bow itself is transparent yellow. The colours are, frankly, somewhat random, although the set of colours works well enough together.
There are quite a few somewhat randomly added elements, and while this vehicle clearly looks like a warship, it's not a realistic boat by any means. So I guess it's a space warship, or something along those lines. There's a battleship-like protrusion under the bow at the front, which is a cool feature. Along with the bridge tower and the deck guns, this really defines the vehicle.
I'm not going to see if this thing floats, but there are four small black wheels underneath and it rolls surprisingly well considering how much mass is resting on the wheels. The front three gun sets all rotate as one - if you spin one, internal gearing causes the other two to rotate as well, which is cool. The rear set, behind the bridge, also turn, on their own. The third set is actually different from the others - it's a missile launcher. While the others have small yellow twin cannons this set has two larger yellow missiles which fire independently. The guns can lift up to about 60°, the launchers are fixed on an angle of around 20°. There's a missile firing sound gimmick, activated when the launcher is rotated past 90° to the left - or back. I'm usually critical of the electronic gimmicks, since they often lead to ungainly large blocks restricting Transformers. This is the sort of size range where this is not an issue.
This is my favourite of Omega Supreme's various alternate modes, primarily because it's the best defined. It actually transforms into the left half of the robot mode. It can also form a "battle station mode", which is essentially the front half of the ship floating over the top of the stern, which acts as a leg while the bridge is a foot. It's okay, although I think the boat mode is a much better configuration to the battle station, which is essentially an intermediate mode.
While it's not a realistic boat by any stretch, Omega Supreme's warship is the highlight of this toy for me. The sheer scale makes this boat cool, and the fact that he has eight targetable weapons is in itself fun. The linked guns at the front are fun as well.
MINING VEHICLE MODE
Height: 14cm Length: 42cm Width: 10.5cm
A yellow two-section vehicle, the front of which is a yellow and black truck of sorts, the rear is a black base with a giant yellow arm on top, ending in a red claw. The two sections are joined together with a grey tube. Again the colours are a tad random, but that's not what bothers me here. This is quite obviously the right side of the robot lying down. The back looks like a robot arm while the overall vehicle is somewhat contrived. Anyway, the front has four smaller wheels at the front and four at the back, all of which are black with silver painted hubcaps, and there are six smaller wheels at the back. The windows on the wraparound cabin are metallic blue while there's a large transparent yellow cockpit canopy at the rear. I'm not entirely sure what the designer intended this to be, but I'm calling it a mining vehicle.
The individual elements here - the mining truck at the front, the mining cage at the rear and the claw arm - are all good enough, but the overall look here just feels forced. I get the feeling the designer has tried to make a vehicle out of robot parts rather than making half a robot out of a vehicle. It's not awful, but it's a pretty poor disguise. The grey tube in the middle _looks_ like a thigh, and the claw on the end of the arm doesn't _need_ to transform.
That's not to say there isn't some nice play value here. This vehicle rolls very well on its fourteen wheels. The arm at the back rotates on the shoulder joint and the elbow bends, while the arm lifts up to about 60°. There's a black slider on the left of the arm, slide it backwards and the claw pushes forward impressively. The top and bottom of the claw open and close, although they don't move very far. There are three small blue arms on the front half, which looks like they're designed to strip rock off mine walls or something. They have two hinges each and their grey base rotates through 360°.
Again there is a battle station mode, and while again this nothing more than an intermediate mode, the giant claw on a long arms makes a little bit more sense than half a battleship on a leg. The principle is the same, although much of the toy forms a poseable arm.
I'm not sold on this vehicle mode. The play value is pretty good, but the vehicle itself just feels strained. The play value relies on robot poseability too, which feels like a cheat. Fun, but at the time, simple.
COMBINED VEHICLE MODE
Yeah okay, whatever. Basically, you plug the mining vehicle into the back of the boat. The end result is impressively long at 79cm, but there's not really anything special otherwise. It's impossibly long - and that is cool - but it's not a vehicle so much as another cheat.
HEADMASTER ROBOT
Height: 5.5cm Width: 4cm
A small robot with a red torso, red head, mid blue face, blue arms and thighs and black boots. It's a pretty well shaped robot for what is essentially a Headmaster head. The head looks suspiciously like Omega Spreem, which proves the designer was well aware of the history of the Omega Supreme concept. This robot is simply called "Omega Supreme" which is rather lazy, but the design itself is not.
The robot has ball jointed shoulders and hips - the latter are effectively rotators - while the knees are hinged. He does have something of a backpack which limits the poses you can play this figure in, but the articulation is still impressive.
You can actually use this figure with both vehicles. He plugs into the front of the bridge tower of the boat, which is kinda pointless, although he does effectively form an extension of the bridge (if a strange one). The cool part is that the cage at the back of the mining vehicle is essentially designed for him.
TRANSFORMATION TO ROBOT MODE
Pretty simple for a toy this size, really. Rotate the bridge area of the boat back, rotate the bridge tower itself again. Fold out the stern to form his boot, rotate to starboard to form the leg. Fold the bow down to form his shoulder, fold the front again to form his arm. Set aside.
Rotate the front half of the mining vehicle to the left, fold up his foot. Fold up the plate underneath the rear to form the robot's shoulderblades and plug the two halves together. The mining vehicle hardly needs to transform.
There's a fairly wide but short black post on the yellow plate, which is where you plug in the head. You can actually extend it slightly, revealing metallic blue eyes. The idea is that this is a robot that doesn't need the Headmaster, but it's pretty dicey. At least Omega still has a head if you lose the little figure. So, the Headmaster folds up as his G1 counterparts did - fold the legs up, swing up the plate on his backpack to reveal the plate and plug into the torso.
ROBOT MODE
Height: 37cm Width: 27.5cm
A tall robot with a mixed colour scheme. The torso is mainly black with some yellow around the waist and red on the chest. The thighs are uniform and grey, the left boot and arm are based on blue while the right are based in yellow. The head is black with a yellow face behind a transparent red visor (a wonderful G1 tribute!) and the eyes are blue. There are blue antennae on either side of his head, and a grey visor above the face that can swing down. Omega Supreme has a red Autobot logo on his left shoulder. The colours are more or less mixed throughout, so he doesn't have a well defined colour theme, although as with the vehicle modes, it's a mixture of colours that work reasonably well together.
Ss you might expect from the simple transformation, there are quite a few vehicle elements visible here. The bridge is his left foot, the cabin of the mining vehicle the right foot. The claw is his right hand while the bow of the boat is the left (and it works surprisingly well, I have to say). One set of boat guns are on the knee, one on the forearm, and two - including the missile launcher - on top of his shoulderpad. The guns on his shoulder can rotate forward, although the sound gimmick is gone. The right shoulder is the cage from the mining vehicle - and you can place the Headmaster inside still.
There is a lot of play value here, including the eight cannons of the boat mode, the cage and the claw. I should point out that the red claw is designed to superficially resemble the orange one found on his G1 counterpart. The poseability is reasonable, for a toy this size you're always going to come across limitations. The head turns, the shoulders turn and lift out to the sides. The elbows bend and there are rotators below them. The waist is inevitably fixed, since the torso comes together in halves, his hips are hinged while the knees are ratcheting hinges with rotators above them. The left foot lacks a heelspur, which limits the available poses, but I'm glad that both the knees and hips are ratcheted to help support the weight of this robot mode.
The G1 tribute isn't all that strong here, although the basic premise of the toy is quite similar. The colours and asymmetry only really allude to the G1 Omega Supreme, the face and claw are the main elements which point to G1. The disparate elements actually look pretty good, although the imbalance of colour on either side is spectacularly disjointed. The repaint, Omega Sentinel (which wasn't released here in Australia), is far more successful in this regard.
There's a "Powerlinx" mode, allowing him to combine with Optimus Prime. Sort of, anyway. The yellow shoulderplate lifts up to the right opening up a cavity where the main Optimus Prime robot can fit. The yellow plate just sits in the air, so this body suit really looks stupid. In reality it's Omega Supreme with a different head and one of the worst pieces of unnecessary kibble I've seen. The smaller vehicles can attach to dedicated panels that fold out. There's one of the outside of either boot and two on the left arm - forearm and shoulder. Not only are the added vehicles awkward and pointless, the panel colours are less than ideal. Those on the yellow half are grey while the blue half sports a red panel. Considering that these panels don't contribute to the vehicle modes, the colour mismatches are annoying. I really get the feeling the smaller vehicles join up here simply because it adds play value. Because this feature doesn't really server any other purpose.
While it's a decent robot mode and impressive in many ways, the colours hold him back - not so much the actual colours used but the uneven placement. The head is nice, and the Headmaster gimmick works quite well, but this robot mode is a motley crue which fails to gel as well as it should.
VARIATIONS
None that I'm aware of, although as mentioned there's a more thoughtful repaint, Omega Sentinel. FortMax reed tells me that Omega Sentinel was hard to find in the USA, which only makes the whole thing more frustrating, really.
OVERALL
The idea here is pretty good - two vehicles that can combine both as a robot and in alternate mode. Except the G1 version did it in style and with purpose, whereas this one does it for the sake of it, and tries far too hard. The battleship is nice, if not fantastic, but the mining vehicle is little more than half a robot on its side. The combined vehicle and battle station modes are nothing more than afterthoughts. The robot mode is okay, but the colour layout is careless, which is symptomatic of the unfocused effort here. The combination with Optimus Prime really offers almost nothing, as if the designer was told to make them combine somehow, and added it in later. The play value is extensive, but there's not a lot that really jumps out at you for a toy this size. If you like the idea, I'd recommend tracking down Omega Sentinel instead - I passed this toy up, and while Omega Sentinel was never released here in the end, I don't regret it - 4/10
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