Review – Androidz Muzzle Flash and Tank

Released in 2010, ToyQuest’s Androidz series (Amazon.com search*) was a line of little robot toys with some cool designs and fantastic ideas that, in looking back, was destined to fail. The company had hopes for the line — read the press release at their site and see the official website — but it never had the cartoon to draw in the kids.

And that’s unfortunate, because the company put a lot of effort and money into the line (see the Parry Game Preserve checklist) and had some cool ideas. But between the lack of an animated series (or even webisodes or comics) and some manufacturing problems it just never caught on and moved to the clearance bins fairly quickly.

Muzzle Flash

First up is Muzzle Flash, fairly standard of the Androidz series robot toys and a good spot to start since covering his specifics will basically cover all of the robots in the line. Muzzle Flash stands a little over 1.5-inches tall, includes a die-cast metal base plate with wheels, and has articulation points at the shoulders (swivels and a hinge). The robot can swing his arms 360-degrees around and also pivot them out to his sides. And that covers his range of movement, but those wheels work great (which is why the line included playsets with ramps).

Muzzle Flash has a nice sculpt, but it’s the manufacturing where things start to go a little wrong. The individual parts of the toy that are connected together don’t quite line up nicely; take a look at the sides of the toy in the below image and you can see what I mean. What’s even worse is that of the two toys in the pack Muzzle Flash lines up neater and cleaner and looks the best.

Muzzle Flash’s paint apps are okay, with the toy molded in tan plastic and then hit with black, gray, and brown as you can see in the pics. (It’s possible the arms are gray plastic with red paint; I’m not certain and don’t want to scratch the surface to find out.) Overall it’s a fun robot toy that reminds me of the old Micro Machines Z-Bots series (see my Z-Bots Military Combots review if you’re unfamiliar with Z-Bots). But it’s not fun enough to make up for the problems with Muzzle Flash’s package mate, Tank.

Tank

Remember the seam I was talking about on Muzzle Flash? Well, if you look at Tank you’ll see a similar problem that is made far worse because the seam runs vertically up the center of the toy’s front. The face is misaligned! And when you flip around to the back of the toy the alignment problems don’t improve and what should have been a nifty little robot toy instead looks like a much cheaper work than it actually is.

The plastic’s nice. The die-cast metal base and wheels are a great idea, the sculpts are neat, but the decision to split Tank the way they did seriously — in my opinion — took this from what had the chance to be a very fun line to collect and turned it into a little bit of a disappointment. I wish the line had performed better than it had and succeeded — we all need more robot toys on the market, right? — and while I don’t think fixing the alignment issues would have overcome the lack of a cartoon I do think better manufacturing would have helped the line find a strong horde of fans.

Closing Thoughts

I feel a little mean saying such nasty things about ToyQuest’s Androidz series (Amazon.com search*), but part of that is my disappointment in finding the alignment trouble with the two halves of the robot toys.

Maybe I’ll come back and look at these in a year or so and be less harsh, but for now I’m saying the toys didn’t meet my expectations.