Review: Playmates Terminator Salvation T-1

This is going to be a quick review because it is a very simple toy. The toy comes pretty much pre-assembled, you only need to put the torso and clip the rear tracks onto the lower tank part of the robot to complete it. The toy is like a bigger version of something you'd get with a McD happy meal. There's some mass to it, just because of the sheer size of it, but that's about the only good part about it. The paint apps are sloppy, looks like the worker painting this one was in a hurry to get home or something. The "mud" is a sloppy wash of red, light and dark brown. The feature is the "firing projectiles", which shoots out the barrels of the machine guns on its arms. I don't know who came up with this idea, I thought it would be obvious that machine guns are suppose to shoot out bullets and not shoot out the whole barrel to hit the enemy in the face, apparently the toy designers at Playmates think otherwise. One "neat" feature is that the torso rotates about 90 degrees back and forth when you roll the toy, it is triggered by a gear mechanism connected to one of the wheels under the tracks. I'd prefer it if they kept it as a simple rotating joint and add some articulation to the "arms". But it's a cool feature none the less, it sort of simulates scouting. There are no joints on the arms of the upper part except for the mount for the machine guns (if you can even consider that as a joint). It rotates about 45 degrees and come loose every so often when you try to rotate it. Another interesting thing to note is that the pictures on the front of the packaging, as well as, the instructions are wrong. It shows the robot with the lower part mounted 180 degrees backwards. I actually assembled it this way and thought it looked out of place at first. A quick check on wiki shows the correct look of the robot.

Overall, I would give this toy a 6/10. The machine gun barrel projectiles and the inaccurate display pictures just shows the ignorance of the designers at Playmates. The "scouting" feature and the sculpt saves it though. Sculpt-wise, I think it is quite nice. I only picked this up because it was on clearance for $5, I would have never paid the original $13 for this toy. I think a lot of people think so too because these have been peg-warming ever since they were released. Even at $5, I couldn't bring myself to buy the T-rip or T-700 because they were too poorly made (poor paint, articulation, face sculpt). I only picked up the T-1 because I thought it would fit in the Star Wars or Joe-verse. I will definitely fix it up and give it a quick repaint when I have time. With all that said, I think I'd pick a few more up at $5 if I see them again just because they look so cool.