As we saw with Blitzwing, Lugnut comes in a pretty nice looking window box with some jagged, eye-catching edges and a simple animated style. The back panel shows photos of the toy along with details of its features and some tidbits about Lugnut’s character. He’s packaged in his jet bomber mode and he is a hell of a lot easier to get out than Blitzwing was… thank God for that.

Lugnut’s aircraft mode is pretty cool, so long as you dig the super-deformed elements at work here. The wing-mounted engines are HUGE, as are the bombs hanging off the bottom of the wings. Everything else is more or less in proportion. I do really like the design of the nose, with the multi-faceted windshield and the rotating turrets on each side. There’s a third rotating turret on his back, and his landing gear can retract. The purple and blue color scheme works really well for a Decepticon and the hazard stripes on the bombs are nice touch and give the deco a little pop. It’s worth noting that the bombs are part of his robot form and are not detachable.

The package exclaims that Lugnut features “mechanized auto conversion.” Um, yeah, this doesn’t work so well, and trying to do it manually makes me feel like I’m breaking the figure. Nonetheless, once he’s converted, Lugnut’s robot form isn’t too bad, although he’s definitely more stylized than Blitzwing. His upper half is all bulked up, while from the waist down he’s scrawny and short. I’m sure this is all part of the intended animated look, but if you aren’t into this style, I don’t think this figure will work for you. On the plus side, he has very good articulation, and I actually like the way his forearms feature both claws and what appear to be laser cannons.

Some may cry foul at the fact that when transforming Lugnut, a rather large part of his tail section is removed for the process. I’m not big on having to remove parts like this, but in this case it does serve a purpose and in reality, you can leave it where it as on his robot mode if you prefer. It just adds to the bulk of his back kibble. The reason for detaching the tail section is because it becomes a huge Mace . It’s impressive looking and actually deploys itself by banging the bottom of the shaft on a hard surface… or in the case of mine… it sometimes does that. Unfortunately, it just sort of plugs into the socket of Lugnut’s “hands” and he can’t really wield it all that well.

Lugnut is one of those figures I would never have bought at full price, but getting a Voyager for the price of a Deluxe seemed worthwhile, or at least too good a deal to pass up for a Transformers whore like me. I didn’t expect to like him a lot, but he does have some decent qualities and I can see him being a lot of fun for kids and fans of the toon. The best thing I can say about him is that he’s a spot-on recreation of his animated counterpart, and that should go a long way to please the fans, even if it doesn’t mean so much to me.