If you hadn’t noticed, Hasbro Transformers reviews have been drying up here. This is only my second for this year, and there were only about half a dozen or so last year. I still love Transformers, I’m still waiting for Beachcomber and Swoop, but otherwise I’ve got most of what I wanted out of the official Hasbro stuff and I can’t think of much shown at SDCC that interested me. Still, every now and then something comes out that entices me, like this boxed set of updates to two of the four Deluxe Insecticons. These guys were originally rolled out in the 1985 catalog and I was both appalled and obsessed with them. On the one hand, they didn’t look anything like my beloved Insecticons, I think they were recycled Bandai toys, and they never appeared in the cartoon. On the other hand, they looked so unique that I couldn’t help but want them. Although, to be fair, I wanted every Transformers figure when I was a kid! Well, I don’t remember ever seeing them in any stores and so it was not meant to be.

The figures come in a fully enclosed box with a small Weapon Master type guy called Malleus Minotaurus… seriously, WTF Hasbro? I hate this box. The character art looks good, but it feels like the Transformers logo should be running down the opposite side. As it is, it makes the box look like it’s upside down when it’s not. Also, look at all the qualifiers… Transformers Legacy United Doom’N Destruction Collection. The Transformers branding has become a confusing mess to me and I honestly have no idea what line is what anymore. But enough of my old-man griping… Let’s start with Barrage and his bug mode first.

Like his G1 predecessor, Barrage’s alt mode is a rhino beetle. The figure is a repaint and remold of Legacy Bombshell, a figure that I have yet to find so I gave up and dropped a preorder. It’s a decent looking alt mode, but since most of the rework is done around the head, the Bombshell similarities stand out as pretty obvious. On the other hand, I do kind of like how this brings the character more into line with the original Insecticons, making them a little more cohesive when displayed together on the shelf. The head horn comes up from the bottom and I think it should be on top, but I’m no bugologist. And in fairness, I’m pretty sure the original toy did that too. I do like the coloring here. The green and yellow plastic looks great together, and there’s a bit of white and red thrown into for added pop. The sonic rifle can plug into either hole on his pack to give him some extra firepower in bug mode, and it’s a repaint of the weapon that came with Bombshell.

Transformation is very similar to what I’ve seen of Bombshell, but Barrage flips the chest to the back and uses the head horn to fill in the new chest, all while not jutting out as awkwardly far as the chest on the G1 Barrage. And all this sure goes a long way to make this robot mode look new and distinctive. The new bug legs can remain pegged into the arms, and I like to angle them back a bit to keep them out of the way. The coloring here remains pretty similar as the beetle, but now he’s showing more yellow. I dig the way the red bug eyes land just under his chest for an extra splash of color, and he has a Decepticon emblem square in the middle of his chest. The back fills out pretty well, but here’s where it’s really obvious that he’s a close cousin to Bombshell. Either way, this is an excellent homage to the original toy’s robot mode.

The head sculpt is pretty cool, borrowing the general beats of the G1 figure, but giving it a full makeover. The yellow face is angular with a dominant mouth plate, two big red eyes and a red panel on the forehead. That panel kind of looks like a third eye from a distance. He also has the green V-shaped antenna coming up from behind, but refined to be not as exaggerated as the original toy. I’d like to think that this is what the Sunbow design would have looked like if Barrage ever showed up in the cartoon.

As I noted earlier, the weapon is a recolor of Bombshell’s, but we’ll still go ahead and call it his sonic rifle. The side pieces can come off and you can customize it a little bit. It’s not really a good match for the G1 figure’s weapon, but I’m not upset over that. I do wish he had come with a sword, like the original did. Lets’ move on to Chop Shop!

Chop Shop’s bug mode is a stag beetle and while Barrage was a shake up of Legacy Bombshell, Chop Shop makes use of Shrapnel. And I gotta say, I think the homage works really well here. New additions include the extra pair of legs that plug into each side, newly sculpted pincers to match the original toy, and a new head, which can be seen in bug mode as two little antenna like appendages. Like Barrage, the reuse is really obvious here, but with the few changes and the brown and orange recolor, I think he looks great, even if he isn’t quite as striking as the original toy. Chop Shop comes with two guns, which is a recolor of one of the Shrapnel’s, and these can be plugged into his back for a super-bug assault mode!

While Barrage’s transformation changed a few things up over Bombshell, Chop Shop’s transformation is identical to Shrapnel and the resulting figure is a lot more similar too. There’s no clever swap of back for front on the torso, apart from the deco, the only changes here are the bug legs that are pegged into the arms, the pincers, and the head. Now, that’s not to say that this doesn’t look great, because I think it does, but the resulting robot looks a lot less like his G1 predecessor than Barrage does, and the Shrapnel chest is really obvious. The deco remains very close to the bug mode with a little more orange showing.

The new head is excellent, and a perfect update to the G1 toy. The rounded dome and angled red eyes give him a sinister visage. There’s some orange paint on his vocalizer box, as well as the twin antenna that sweep down to form open pipes on the sides of his cheeks.

In addition to the twin guns, which I already showed plugged into his bug mode, Chop Shop also comes with a recolor of Shrapnel’s gun. None of these are a great fit for the G1 toy’s weapon, but once again, I’m OK with that. He also doesn’t come with a sword. I would have been fine with Hasbro tossing in recolors of the same sword mold for either, especially compared to what I’m going to look at next.

It’s Malleus Minotaurus, and he feels like the design team was sitting around saying, “What else we got to throw in this box to get it to the right price point?” He’s a re-color of the Battle Master Smashdown, and that’s being generous because he’s just gray plastic with a little blue for his eyes and forehead emblem. As his name suggests, his robot mode is minotaur-themed with a bull-like head. He transforms into a hammer, hence the malleus part of his name. Hey, at least Hasbro is teaching kids The Latin! As a kid, I probably would have loved this concept, but as an adult collector, I don’t have much use for him and the idea of a robot transforming into something that robots hit other robots with is just a bit too goofy for me. He does come with two semi-translucent blue energy effect pieces to attach to the front and back of the hammer’s head.

Both Barrage and Chop Shop turned out great, although Barrage gets the nod for being the more reworked of the two. I love how they managed to flip the torso to give him a new chest, and it makes me wonder if that was planned from the start or just a really clever retrofit. And while Chop Shop doesn’t get any new engineering, I’m happy with how much they re-sculpted for this figure. In either case, I wouldn’t have guessed that the regular Insecticon molds could be tweaked to work this well as the Deluxes. Will we get a second set with Venom and Ransack? Well, I guess we did get a Kickback repaint as Ransack in one of those Buzzworthy sets, but I’d like to see Hasbro try again and give us Venom too. And wouldn’t you know it… My Bombshell arrived just in time to miss getting in the group picture, but I’ll probably get around to giving him a proper review in the near future and we’ll get them all together then!