Review – Unique Toys’ Splinter (Wreck-Gar)

I recently posted a review of the Unique Toys Salmoore (review here), their completely unofficial take on the GoBots Cy-Kill character. Well, Cy-Kill isn’t at all alone since Unique Toys made some tooling tweaks to the mold to bring us this completely unofficial Transformers Wreck-Gar toy. Fantastic robot mode, great vehicle mode, but getting between the two modes is a major pain!

I Bent My Wookie!

Just like Salmoore (review here) the arms on Splinter are an incredible source of frustration that will leave you in physical pain, the plastic on your toy scratched, and your mind constantly reminding you: “Hey, idiot! You paid for this. Don’t forget it!” I’m serious, this is one of the worst examples ever of poor transformation design and it all comes down to the arms needing a few milimeters of clearance and the toy would have gone from a pain to a fantastic work of art.

How Are These Even Tested?

Between the frustrations of Splinter and some of the official Hasbro Transformers toys — I’m looking at you Reveal the Shield Perceptor (review here) and Subscription Service Barricade (review here) — I am trying to figure out what sort of physical testing process is used for the creation of transforming robot toys. It cannot all be CAD work online and there has to be a stage at which physical parts are twisted and manipulated to test the toys. But is the testing done by the designers or average “man on the street” blind-testers? I’m guessing the actual designers do any testing . . . how else can we explain the state of modern Transformers toy instructions?

But How Is The Toy?

Nearly identical to Salmoore (review here), meaning that it really is a great robot design. The addition of the shoulder plates (Salmoore also comes with those, but I didn’t attach them since they detract from the Cy-Kill look), new head, and changes to the left foot — as well as color choices — change up the appearance quite a bit and make this a wonderful robot mode take on Wreck-Gar.

In a perfect world the toy would be sized to fit in better with Hasbro’s official Junkion toys (Amazon.com search*), but even at different scales this unofficial Wreck-Gar doesn’t look too out of place with the Hasbro toys.

If Unique Toys were to go in and fix the arm transformation of this mold I could be convinced to grab one or two more of them in Junkion colors (with new weapons and heads, of course), but I’d wait for reviews to verify the transformation problems are fixed before ordering anything. It is terrible that the clearance problems with the arms detract from what is otherwise a fantastic design, but I’m done having my fingers mauled transforming this design.

Closing Thoughts

You really need to see my review of the Unique Toys Salmoore (review here) to fully understand my thoughts on Splinter, but for those of you in a rush I’ll state:

This is a great robot that is seriously damaged by the tightness of the arm transformation. Unique Toys could have made something incredible if they had better tested the transformation, but as it is I cannot recommend this toy to anyone. Skip this release and save your money!!!