It’s Thursday again, and that means I get to open up a new Transformer and yup, it’s another Stunticon! I’ve been pretty happy with these guy so far and now I’ve only got two left to open before I can cobble them all together into Menasor. Which Stunticon is it going to be today? Why, Offroad of course! Ah, Offroad. As a kid he was my very favorite of all the… HEY! Wait a minute… who the hell is Offroad? Yes, friends, just like the Aerialbots had their very own imposter in the form of a helicopter named Alpha Bravo, the Stunticons that I know and love have their own ringer and he’s a Pick Up Truck named Offroad. Where the Primus is Wildrider? He’s supposedly still coming. In the meantime, Offroad arrives on the scene with a mold that can be better refashioned into members of other combiner teams. This displeased me up until I found out that we’d still be getting Wildrider, so let me take in a breath of tolerance and see what this guy’s all about.

Offroad comes packaged in his robot mode with his weapon and combiner part beside him, all plastered in front of a lovely free comic book. At least the back of the package has a blurb about Offroad that admits he’s the newest member of the team, not like some Poochie that they tried to retcon in without thinking we would know about it. But hey, he’s a Decepticon car and by my very nature I love Decepticon cars. That philosophy hasn’t failed me since Hasbro decided to repaint Armada Sideswipe into Oil Slick. *shudder* Anyway, this is case where my outlook is still fairly optimistic. Let’s start with his alt mode.

This is certainly not a bad looking little truck. The detail in the front grill, headlights, and bumper is pretty good and I really like the wheels. It’s also worth mentioning that with his charcoal colored body and red painted windows, Hasbro did their best to give him G1 Wildrider’s colors. Hell, he even sports the same off center Decepticon logo on his hood. Still, Offroad manages to bust out on his own a bit with those red color splashes on his doors. The alt mode holds together quite tightly and rolls along great.

Offroad features no less than four ports to peg in his weapon, two on the sides and two on the truck bed, but considering he comes with an axe, none of them do all that much in terms of weaponizing him. I guess the axe shaft kind of looks like an exhaust pipe, but given the positions of the peg holes, that doesn’t help much. There’s also a tab so you can attach the combiner part, which doesn’t look as great as it did with Breakdown, but I can still get behind it.

Transforming Offroad is about as simple as it gets for a Deluxe Class toy. The only real clever thing here is the way his legs extend outward. Otherwise, the arms pulling out from the sides and the bed of the truck becoming the legs is pretty standard stuff. He is a little mis-transformed in the package as his backpack does drop down a little bit to put the wheels right on the back of his shoulders. Looking at him from behind doesn’t leave much to the imagination.

While Hasbro tried to pay respects to Wildrider with Offroad’s coloring in car mode, the robot mode abandons any further homages. Still, this is a pretty solid robot mode. The exposed combiner port on his chest doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it does on Dragstrip and he’s got some neat things going for him. The car door armor on his shoulders is well placed and I really dig the sculpted and painted springs on his lower legs. The backpack also feels more natural than Breakdowns does, despite it being clearly visible from the front. It gives me a little bit of a Huffer or Pipes vibe the way it forms a hood.

And then there’s the head sculpt, which on its own merits is quite good, but it still feels out of place to me on one of these figures. It doesn’t shout Stunticon to me and I’m not a big fan of the green painted face, despite the fact that the sculpt of that face is quite good. Every time I look at this noggin I feel like I’m looking at a Cybertron figure. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, but again, it just seems strange on a Combiner Wars figure in 2015. Of course, this could all just be the booze talking. I’m on my third Maker’s Mark since I started writing.

Articulation on these figures has been pretty good and Offroad is no exception. You get ball joints in the shoulders and some oddly strong ratcheting hinges in the elbows. The legs are ball jointed at the hips and feature hinges in the knees and swivels in the thighs. The neck is ball jointed and you do get a swivel in the hip. Offroad is not super-articulated by any means, but he is just limber enough to make him fun to play around with.

Offroad comes with an axe, which I find to be rather disappointing because I tend to like at least one gun with my Convertobots. I suppose I could have him hold the combiner part as some kind of quad-barreled gun, but that just doesn’t do it for me.

Call me a foolish old GeeWunner, but I think I would have liked Offroad more if he weren’t masquerading as one of my beloved Stunticons. There is nothing inherently bad about this figure and I have a feeling I’ll warm up to him a little more once I get a proper Combiner Wars Wildrider to replace him. That having been said, this team is shaping up pretty nicely and I have only one more to open before I can get my combining thang on. I’ll  also note here that I totally approve of what I’ve seen of the way Hasbro has resculpted and repainted this figure to be First Aid, so there’s another reason that Offroad does not deserve my scorn. He’s not my favorite of the Stunticons so far, but he ain’t bad either!