Prime Ultra Magnus (Voyager)

Robot Mode: Let’s look at the positive sides first. Ultra Magnus is a gorgeously designed robot. Closely resembling his Animated predecessor, he easily adapts the look to the Prime aesthetic. The head looks very cool and the sculpting looks very nice overall. The paint job looks good overall, though it’s very, very blue. Some more paint details would definitely have been nice, as the Cyberverse version of Magnus actually looks more detailed than the much bigger Voyager figure.

Ultra Magnus suffers from worse than a few missing paint apps, though. First off, there is the way the shoulders are designed. Magnus’ massive arms hang off two comparatively tiny ball joints that, while giving him lots of shoulder articulation, are not strong enough to support the massive weapon he also comes with. Second, the shoulders are attached to a swivelling piece of the chest that is easily pushed out of place every time you touch Ultra Magnus’ rather large backpack (basically the entire driver’s cabin of the truck mode). So posing him without pushing parts of his chest out of place isn’t easy.

Finally, there is the giant weapon Magnus comes with. As has come to be the norm for Ultra Magnus toys, it’s a giant battle hammer. It also doubles as a rifle. But while it’s not quite as clunky as most of the other Voyager figure light-up weapons in the Prime toyline, it’s not exactly an elegant weapon, either. I’d have much preferred an up-scaled version of the hammer Cyberverse Magnus came with. At least you can lock the weapon in hammer mode, something most of the other weapons are incapable of. Anyway, the weapon looks good as a hammer, but as a rifle you basically have the head of the hammer flopping around loosely on top of it. Magnus can hold the weapon in either hand, mount it on either forearm, or store it on his back. He also has a big missile he can attach to either forearm or his back.

Finally, the entire toy, while good-looking, feels... cheap. I can’t exactly say what it is, but on the whole Magnus feels fragile. So bottom line: a nice robot for putting on your shelf, but I can’t help but feel that actually playing with it will cause it to go to pieces sooner rather than later.

Alternate Mode: After a very simple transformation that’s almost identical to the one of the Cyberverse figure, Ultra Magnus becomes a semi-truck with a flatbed on which you can mount his big weapon as a kind of rig / crane thing. There are at least three different ways you can configure the weapon on the back of the truck, either pointing backwards as a crane or forward as a weapon (plugged into the roof of the driver’s cabin).

There is little else to write here. Sadly the attachment points for the weapon on the back of the truck are set up so that you can only use one of them to plug in the weapon, never both. Not sure if that is intentional or a design error, but it causes the weapon on the back to be rather unstable. Anyway, Ultra Magnus’ vehicle mode is solid, but little more than that.

Remarks: Ultra Magnus has yet to appear in the Prime TV series, but he played a part in both the Exodus novel and the War for Cybertron video games. There is some speculation that he might yet appear in the series, given that his robot mode has several “faked” parts such as wheels in his feet and on his shoulders, which only make sense if there is an actual animation model with such parts. So far, though, no concrete information on any TV appearances by Prime Ultra Magnus.

As a toy Ultra Magnus is basically just an upscaled version of the Cyberverse figure. But while rather weak ball-jointed shoulders don’t matter that much in a smaller figure, this and other design details drag this figure down quite a bit. Ultra Magnus look gorgeous and really cool, but he needs better shoulders, a better chest design, and a better weapon. Also, a few more paint apps wouldn’t have hurt, either. So bottom line: not a bad figure, but not a particularly good one, either.

Rating: C+