Ok, I’m back for Part 2 of Mech Idea’s amazing, marvelous, and pretty damn cool tribute to the G1 Jumpstarters. Earlier I gushed about Apex (“Not-Top Spin”) and now it’s time to take a look at his brother in arms, Geminus (“Not-Twin Twist”). Geminus is a recolor and remold of Apex, so I should be able to keep this mercifully shorter than Part 1. Then again, I still have a lot of gushing to do, so I won’t make any promises.

There’s the packaging. Once again it’s the only bad thing about these guys, and by bad I just mean it isn’t as polished as some of the packaging we get with other third-party toys. I also would have preferred straight boxes to these carded blister packs, just because they tend to store better. That having been said, if Mech Ideas wants to keep producing figures this amazing at this good a price, they can wrap them in old Chinese newspapers and shoelaces for all I care.

Geminus’ alt mode is a drill tank. He’s largely the same configuration and sculpt as his brother. The most noticeable difference is he has little drill bits instead of Apex’s intakes, and instead of wings he has molded and painted tank treads running along the sides. Geminus has the same little recessed area above his cockpit for an Autobot symbol, if you have a sticker lying around, and his deco is the opposite of Apex’s so what was white is now blue, and vice versa. His vents are painted in a similar manner to Apex’s and his drills are painted with nice bright, metallic silver. Some have argued that his drills are a little puny, but their size was clearly sacrificed for his robot mode, and I approve of the trade-off.

Geminus comes with the same hammer as Apex, but a new set of guns. In this case, the hammer is supposed to peg into the top and serve as a giant cannon, and you can still plug his guns in on either side of it. Obviously, you can do the same thing with Apex’s hammer, but the intent here is to make Geminus look more like a conventional tank. I haven’t decided whether I prefer him with or without the hammer-cannon yet. In some cases it looks pretty good, other times, I think it just looks like a giant hammer on his roof. Either way, if you prefer the more clean G1 homage without the weapons, you certainly have that option, and just like Apex, Geminus’ hammer can break down and you can stow it under his backside.

Geminus transforms exactly the same as Apex and I didn’t encounter any problems or quality issues. The plastic is great and the engineering is clever. But it’s still a good idea to be mindful of some of the tiny tabs.

Robot mode! All the love I expressed for Apex remains true for Geminus. Once again, the reversed deco looks great, and he actually has some unique yellow paint apps to distinguish him from his brother. His head sculpt makes him look a little more of a bruiser than Apex, with a slightly bulkier helmet and separate eyes instead of the visor. Geminus is a fantastic looking robot with super fun articulation.

Oh, right… one more thing. If you pre-ordered this pair you got a little extra bonus. It’s an extra battle damaged head for Geminus, which may or may not be a very specific reference to a certain character in some limited comic book series, which everyone should read because it happens to be fantastic. It is undoubtedly a cool little extra with impressive sculpting and paintwork for such a tiny piece. I doubt I’ll ever display him with it, but I’ll never complain about getting a nifty bonus like this one.

And there you have the Demolition Crue! I waffled back and forth over pre-ordering these guys for a long while, just because I haven’t had any experience with Mech Ideas before and spending loads of money on third-party Transformers is still something rather new to me. But now that I have them in hand, I’m inspired to fall back on the words of the great Dr. Channard, “And to think… I hesitated.” These guys are awesome in every way and at $70 for the pair they are a great value as far as third-party robots go. All that’s left to say is that I am thrilled to have this pair in my collection and I’ll be very interested to see what figures Mech Ideas churns out next.