Name: Barricade
Series: Movie tie-ins
Allegiance: Decepticon
Alternate Mode: Mustang Police Cruiser
Thanks to Tiby for loaning me Barricade for this review
CAR MODE
Height: 2.5cm Length: 7cm Width: 3cm
A black Mustang with white doors, silver windows and "POLICE" in silver on both doors. He's a good match for the deluxe, albeit with out some of the markings. The stroberack is painted, however - one side red and the other blue. There's a visible black IR receiver sticking out of the rear window, but is hides well amongst the black here. The headlights are silver, the taillights red and there's a silver "643" under the left taillight. His tyres are black rubber with black hubcaps, as on the deluxe. The sculpt is pretty good, he's quite obviously a Mustang, although the colours mask this - being as black as he is. Sadly there's no "to punish & enslave", although at this scale it would hard to read.
The car shape is pretty good, not quite perfect but very close. Barricade's car is slightly smaller than a GoBot/SpyChanger, with different wheels. There are some nice sculpted features, such as side mirrors, doorseams, doorhandles), impact bars and grille detailing, a lot of which is better than you find on SpyChangers.
The remote is a big gun-shaped affair, roughly 17cm long and 9 tall. It's white with some painted black and silver detailing and has "Barricade" with a Decepticon logo on either side. The remote mould is identical for all three IR movie toys, although Bumblebee & Prime get their own paint maps and the names are in different fonts. Barricade is meant to clip on top for storage/transport, but doesn't really stay in place.
The gimmick is underwhelming. The performance is what you'd expect of an IR remote controlled car, with range of a metre or so. He travels is a straight line forward and curves left backward, allowing you to turn, which is typical of the lowest end remote control cars. What disappoints me is how slow the car moves - it really takes the fun out of the concept, especially when you consider how far and fast a SpyChanger will go on a flat surface (albeit with a push off).
The car mode itself is nice considering the scale, and if it were priced as a SpyChanger I'd be really impressed. While the IR mechanism obviously adds to the production costs, as a Transformer I don't think this vehicle is worth the price (3 times that of a Spychanger, at least in Australia). There's some novelty in the idea, of course, but the overall package here is disappointing despite the well paint and detailed car.
TRANSFORMATION TO ROBOT MODE
Same as a SpyChanger - extend the rear to form legs, flip the hood over to form his chest and pull the sides out to become doors.
ROBOT MODE
Height: 6cm Width: 3.5cm
A black robot with a silver head, silver kneecaps and silver on his shins, Barricade is quite dark, but the main colour is on his head which should be black with gold anyway. The hood is his chest, but not in the fashion we'd hope, so this robot just doesn't look much like Barricade. The colours are close in that there's so much black, but the layout is just a generic SpyChanger colour map, so the semblance to movie here is very weak. Having said that, I can see why the emphasis was placed on vehicle mode, when the gimmick is entirely used in that mode.
The weak semblance isn't helped by the dimensions. There's about 0.5cm of thigh, which you'll only see if look up under the chest from below. The shoulder struts are also very short, but there is a clear gap between the arms and chest (unlike Bumblebee). I understand that there needs to be space for the mechanisms, but if the toy was maybe a centimetre longer (in car mode) there would have been room. A smaller remote would have easily offset the extra cost, giving us a far more viable robot mode. This one, while based on a SpyChanger, is well below SpyChanger standard.
Play value is minimal - the shoulders swing and that's it. Unlike the SpyChangers, Barricade does not come with a gun and cannot hold one.
A disappointing robot mode which doesn't really look much like Barricade with a poor robot shape in general. Barricade is little more than a black lump with a silver head, ranking below the worst of the SpyChangers. There's basically no play value, which is to be expected, but that does mean there's just nothing going for this robot mode.
VARIATIONS
None that I'm aware of.
OVERALL
While the idea has merit, Barricade's robot mode is very poor and the gimmick just not enough to save the toy. The car mode looks good, but with such a lacklustre gimmick for price you're paying he needed a good robot mode - allowing the gimmick to be a bonus to the Transformer rather than the only reason for buying it. If Barricade was sold at a similar price to a SpyChanger, I could look past the shortcomings, but at the lower end of deluxe pricing, he just doesn't have much to offer. There's still some novelty in the concept, but I could only recommend picking up one of these toys, not three (which would be Prime, by the way) - 2/10
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