FFZ has never attempted to be a site for bleeding edge, “you’ve seen it here first!” reviews, but I do try to be topical from time to time. Nonetheless, poor Last Chance has been sitting unopened on my shelf for two weeks now and his feature is well past due. It’s not because I’m not anxious to get to him, but I really have been getting a ton of stuff in over the last week or so. Anyway, if you haven’t been following along, Last Chance is the penultimate release in Fansproject’s “Not-Stunticon” combiner team and their homage to Dead End. This has been a fantastic set of figures from day one, so I can’t wait to check him out!

If you own any of these releases, you’ll know just what to expect from the package. Last Chance comes in a really nice little box with a window that shows off the toy in his robot mode. There’s a grid-pattern that is certainly reminiscent of the old G1 package and the box is sort of color coded to match the figure. You get some great character art and pictures of the toy in both modes.

Inside the box, the figure rests in a plastic tray beside his weapon. You also get a plastic baggie with the color folded instruction sheet and a color profile card. As always, the box is totally collector friendly and they all look really nice lined up on the shelf. Let’s start with the alt mode.

While obviously not the same make and model of car as Dead End, Last Chance really follows through nicely with the homage. It’s sexy looking car with sleek contours and some distinctive looking cut outs in the hood. The deep maroon plastic is a good match and he has the same gold and silver stripe running off center from the hood to the roof. The windows are painted in a charcoal grey with a little speckling. Last Chance’s alt mode locks together quite nicely and the seams are tight. As always, the plastic has a quality feel on this piece and his weapon can break down and be stored in the undercarriage.

Transforming Last Chance is a lot easier to me than any of the others in the series. He uses some common Hasbro elements like folding the arms up under the hood and folding the back half of the car out to form the legs. His torso does get a little bit fiddly as you need to shift it forward and back when going from one mode to the other. There aren’t any scary parts where I was afraid I would stress the plastic, and while I did have a leg pop out at the hip ball joint, it goes right back in just fine. As has been the case with the other figures, the instructions aren’t all that helpful, but once I figured out what’s happening, I found it to be a pretty intuitive process and the result delivers what is quite possibly my favorite robot mode on this team.

Last Chance reuses some design elements from Down Force, but it’s so cleverly done that it’s almost impossible to tell, not like T-Bone and Car Crash. He’s also the only one on the team to wear his hood as his chest in what is a rather traditional Transformer style. The rear bumper makes for a nice set of knees, and there are heel stabilizers that can swing out from his feet if necessary, but I find them to be optional and the figure can stand just fine without them.

Last Chance features a classic Decepticon looking head sculpt with a black helmet and a snazzy looking gold painted face. Again, this is my favorite head sculpt of the entire team and the black and gold deco just makes it pop so well.

One common theme to the Causality line has been useful and fun articulation and Last Chance keeps that trend rolling along. Ball joints in the neck, shoulders, hips, wrists, and ankles, offer a great range of motion. Add to that the double hinges in the elbows, hinges in the knees, and swivels in the biceps and thighs and you have a very poseable robot. Dead End is hard to put down once I start playing around with him.

And so with Last Chance on the shelf, all that’s left is Diesel (aka Not Motormaster) to finish off the team. We’ve finally seen more finalized pictures of the figure and the combined mode and they both look quite amazing. Fansproject has yet to solicit him to retailers for pre-order, so now we get to play the waiting game. I’m hoping he’ll be turning up soon, but then Fansproject is running well behind on their other figures, like their versions of Headmasters Weirdwolf and Brainstorm, so when Diesel may be showing up is anybody’s guess. In any event, the figures on this team have been quality efforts at every release. They may not be as big and impressive as some of the other third-party figures, but they certainly show that Fansproject is still among the top tier producers on the third-party Transformer market.