For the past month I have been eschewing the usual randomness of Transformers Thursday by following some convenient segues. It’s taken me through a trio of nautical based Decepticons and now I’m following up last week’s Femme Bot Decepticon with her Autobot counterpart, Override. Besides being another female Transformer, Override is a lot like Thunderblast in that I really dig her alt mode, but her robot mode leaves a lot to be desired. Let’s take a look…

I followed very little of the Unicron Trilogy official fiction, but as I understand it Override hails from the Speed Planet. It’s certainly appropriate since her alt mode is a very sexy looking futuristic car. While this auto mode has a few blemishes, most notably the obvious top half of the robot head peeking out of the top, I just can’t help but love the slick design. The rounded and angled front fenders are beautifully done and the fins coming off the back look pretty cool too. I also dig the translucent wheels, which hammer home the idea that this is a crazy futuristic alien car. The deco here is also pretty tight. The red and white look great together and the silver and black compliment the color pallet nicely. I probably could have done without the orange, but there’s not a lot of it and it blends fairly well with the red.

Naturally, as a Cybertron figure Override comes with her own CyberKey and accompanying gimmick. In this case you plug the key into her backside and it unlocks a pair of spring-loaded guns that position themselves on either side of her cockpit. It’s kind of a subtle gimmick, and I usually leave the guns deployed, but I’m also a sucker for cars with spring-loaded guns, so this gimmick gets a big thumbs up.

Ugh! Override uses also uses a spring-loaded gimmick as part of her transformation. It’s an odd thing to see because I don’t recall a whole lot of Cybertron figures doing this. It’s also generally a bad idea, because while it may be cool to see your figure spring part of the way into the robot mode, springs fail over time and even though mine still seems rather strong, it will pop when handling the toy in car mode from time to time. Plus, when you look at Override’s robot mode, it’s hard not to think that the spring gimmick engineering is responsible for what is not a great looking figure.

The issue here is all in the proportions. You get an unusually wide and blocky torso, and rather small arms and legs. The legs feel like they should pull out to extend farther, but they don’t and her arms just look like tiny T-Rex arms compared to that huge slab of a chest. While on the subject of the legs, this is a figure that doesn’t always like to stand. She’s definitely back heavy, but the high-heel spurs help to counter that. No, the problem is that the ball joints in the hips don’t always want to support her rather large upper body and so she does the splits and collapses. Override’s backpack can be removed to form a double barreled gun. It does help lighten up her back, but I don’t like the weapon at all. It looks so unwieldy and difficult to use.

Before wrapping up, I should also mention that no part of this figure works for me as a female. In fact, I didn’t even know she was a she until I got around to reading her Tech Spech long after I bought the figure. If anything, Override’s broad upper body reminds me of some of the later 80’s G1 Transformers, like Punch. The head sculpt is certainly interesting and has a strong Gundam vibe to the headgear, but the face itself is rather androgynous and I have a weird aversion to orange-faced Transformers. I know it’s strange, but I’m currently undergoing therapy to remedy that and we seem to be making progress.

Yeah, so that’s Override. As a rule, I’m usually a big fan of the Cybertron toys, but Override doesn’t do it for me. I seem to recall being a little easier on her back in the day, so it may just be the decade of better engineering in Transformers that has soured me on this figure. Either way, she certainly does have a very cool Auto mode, one that is very reminiscent of Blurr to me. Apparently I’m not alone because a little checking has turned up some generally impressive customs that show she does indeed make for a great Blurr homage, particularly in her alt mode.