YES! I love SEGA! And YES! I love Golden Axe! I won’t start verbally fapping about the franchise again here, but feel free to check out my reviews of Ax Battler and The Skeleton Soldiers, if you need a reminder! In fairness, most of my experience with the games isn’t in the coin-op form, but rather at home on my SEGA Genesis. I even recently picked up a custom cart of Golden Axe 3, which never released for the US Genesis, but now I can play it anyway! Suffice it to say, I’m very nearly all in on Storm Collectibles’ Golden Axe figures. There are a few Skeleton variants that I haven’t dropped money on yet… YET!!! But I’m just so happy to see these figures getting made.

And so, BEHOLD! DEATH ADDER!!! After Golden Axe is done wiping the floor with you with common enemies, you are rewarded with fighting Death Adder as the final boss! Or is he??? I have a feeling that he might have been taking orders… ah, but that’s just me being paranoid. The figure comes in a window box in the same style as the previous releases, with a lot of extra plastic wrap to make it had to really see the figure inside all that clearly. The illustrated backing for the tray also recreates the character select screen, just like the previous packages did.

And out of the box, Death Adder is quite the bruiser, standing more than head and shoulders above Ax Battler and the Skeletons. He’s also a relatively simple figure, albeit one that does a fabulous job bringing the sprite-based 16-bit villain into a more realistic action figure form! One of the things you may first notice about him is that he’s built with seamless elbow and knee joints, using flexible rubber plastic to cover the internal skeleton. It makes for a great effect, especially since the shoulder and hip joints are somewhat obscured by his armor. On the downside, he doesn’t have anywhere near the range of motion that we got in the Ax Battler body, so it’s a compromise. I dig it, and for a lumbering brute, I’m not sure I need Death Adder to be as nimble as our hero. But while we’re on the subject of articulation, my figure has a loose right ankle hinge. It isn’t broken, but the two halves of the hinged ball separate from time to time. It’s more annoying than a critical fault, but worth mentioning nonetheless!

Death Adder’s buff bod features some wonderfully sculpted muscles, something that Storm has gotten quite adept at delivering. His bulging arms are positively ripped with veins and tendons, making him look like he can tear The Player apart without any need of weapons. His armor is cast in soft plastic with a shiny red finish. The segmented plates look great and there’s a bit of a hammered finish to the shoulder armor. You also get a healthy assortment of different hands, including fists, relaxed, palm-smash, clutching, and weapon holding hands!

As far as the portrait goes, Death Adder comes with two heads, which can be swapped out under his rather epic helmet. Both are human-appearing head sculpts, painted black with yellow piercing eyes. I tend to like the regular one, because my imagination always suggested that Death Adder didn’t have a regular face under that helmet. I don’t know what I thought he had, but I guess I just expected it was something mysterious, similar to an Orko or Warduke. That having been said, I think the gritted teeth expression looks quite good!

Death Adder comes with one accessory, and that’s his giant golden axe! It’s big an imposing, but fairly light and easy for him to wield in either one hand, or both. I really like the gold finish on this weapon. It’s just so lush and satiny, with some silver for the edges.

I pre-ordered this big guy way back when and he’s been waiting for his time in the spotlight for a while now! I seem to recall dropping $115 on him, which isn’t so bad considering how big and chonky he is. And it looks like Storm is re-releasing all of their Golden Axe figures for people who missed out, as pre-orders have gone up again around all the usual places. I think he’s an excellent figure, although the seamless jointing may end up being a polarizing point among some collectors.