Name: Hot Shot
Series: Cybertron
Allegiance: Autobot
Alternate Mode: Sports Car
CAR MODE
Height: 2.5cm Length: 7.5cm Width: 3.5cm
A baby blue sports car with midnight blue tyres and painted gold windows, Hot Shot has a cherry red front bumper rounding out a fairly simple colour scheme. This colour scheme is a copy of the deluxe Hot Shot's, lacking transparent yellow. The blue plastic used is slightly milky, which looks a little cheap. The gold is substituting for yellow and personally I prefer gold over transparent yellow. Despite the milky plastic this is a decent colour scheme, although there's not a lot of painted detail - an Autobot logo somewhere would have been nice.
The moulded detail here is relatively good - Hot Shot has streamlining on his doors, a rear mounted engine block, gold headlights and a rear spoiler. For a Spychanger sized toy, this detailing is respectable, although a paint wash would bring out his sculpt a lot better. Unlike the Spychangers, Hot Shot lacks axles and doesn't roll well at all. There are cherry red winglets that can deploy from either side just above the rear wheels, although you need to partly transform the toy to deploy them.
Fit For Natalie informs me that Hot Shot is based on the Chrysler ME Four-Twelve concept car, although I'm not sure how close that concept car is to a real car mode - or how close Hot Shot is to the concept car itself.
Hot Shot's car mode is convincing enough - it _looks_ like it could be a real car model, but the blue tyres and milky plastic kinda ruin that illusion. The moulded detail is great at this size although the paint job is disappointing. Play value is less than a Spychanger, sadly.
TRANSFORMATION TO ROBOT MODE
Extend the rear to form his legs, split the front, pull the halves out to the sides to form shoulderpads and pull out the doors to form arms. Rotate the backplate, deploy the wings as a sort of cape. There are shades of Hot Rod here, although he doesn't really look much like the G1 Chosen One, sports car alt mode aside.
ROBOT MODE
Height: 9cm Width: 5.5cm
Again mainly baby blue, Hot Shot has cherry red thighs and shoulderpads, midnight blue forearms, groin and chest while his face is silver and crest gold. The silver face and a small stamped Autobot logo on his chest are the only additions to the colour set, and both are welcome additions. The red winglets sit on his backplate which towers behind the head and shoulders. The baby blue doors form forearm covers and on the inside there are three gold cannons (another similarity to Hot Rod). I prefer this colour scheme to that of the vehicle mode simply because there's more happening. Sure, there's lots of baby blue, but there's more of the other colours.
The facial sculpt is great for a toy this size and the torso is also quite detailed. The moulded fists are a little disappointing, but they're not as visible. The arms are long, dangling, things that don't quite look right - they sit a long way out from his torso and the upper arms are very thin. The backplate doesn't clip into position and has an annoying tendency to swing to one side or the other. To be honest I'm not a big fan of the backplate anyway, since it looks kibbly sticking up as high as it does.
Poseability is a little erratic, but the articulation is admirable at this size. The shoulders are ball joint, although the backplate gets in the way of his shoulderpads if you lift the arms - they'll happily lift out to the sides though. The hips are ball joints (again restricted by the backplate, to a far lesser extent), but without knee joints this is of limited value. The legs separate, allowing for a few relaxed straight-leg poses. Cool action poses are out but there's enough movement in his limbs for Hot Shot to stand in a natural, relaxed pose, rather than to attention like so many Transformers.
The backplate causes most of the problems here, and I don't think the winglets are cool enough to compensate. Still, the detail and articulation are great at this scale. A good effort without really being anything special.
VARIATIONS
This same toy was repainted red in Excellion's colours - however the repaint was still called Hot Shot. Classics Legends Bumblebee and Universe Legends Red Alert are repaints of Hot Shot.
OVERALL
In truth this is a pretty good effort at this size, with some great fine detail, a decent colour scheme and some poseability that you wouldn't expect of a toy this size. Despite these positives, Hot Shot is a somewhat limited toy. The backplate really hurts his robot mode, which is the more impressive of his two modes. One of earlier Legends sized mini Transformers in the Cybertron line. Still, for $A6 this is a decent effort - 6.5/10
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