Looked around and didn't see a topic for this fig, so I thought I'd put down my thoughts.

I just got this guy in the mail today, and man am I impressed! As many of you probably know, Energon Quickstrike is a repaint of Bulkhead from the same line. Whereas Bulkhead was a couple shades of green, yellow, orange, and a ghastly blue (mostly on his landing pad/backpack), Quickstrike is a pleasing mix of bright, bold red, shiny silver, and black, with a few accents of yellow and blue. Very stylish. The "landing pad"/afterburner/walker drone/whatever you'd like to call it is molded in the same colors, replacing the baby blue from Bulkhead with black and silver.

After opening this sucker up (which requires a lot of patience as he has FAR too many twist-ties on his box), one can get a good look at his vehicle mode. Quickstrike is a heavily armed attack helicopter. I'm not too familiar with helicopters but I've heard it said he looks like a mix between an Apache and a Cobra. Whatever it is, it looks great, but it's not perfect. I for one think the underside is a wee bit too bulky, and the placement of the arms/machineguns could have been better. They just fold up over the wings. But it could be worse, and aside from that, the vehicle mode is great. Wing-mounted machineguns, and four missile launchers under the wings themselves. Another nice gimmick is that, by pulling back on the landing gear on the tail, the main rotor on Quickstrike will spin. It's not too loud and it spins really nice.

Of course, you can also attach Quickstrike to his landing pad/walker-thing-a-ma-jig. Let me be the first to say that this thing is awesome. It has a pair of thrusters/legs/weapons/whatever you want them to be that are extremely articulated, and have a set of joints that fold in/can be pulled out of the main housing of the legs. In vehicle mode, Quickstrike looks best just resting upon it as if it were part of a base. Makes a good display stand too. But a few imaginative fans are more than likely to give it a "GERWALK/Guardian" mode by letting the legs fold out.

All in all, the vehicle mode gets a 9/10. Looks great, and awesome gimmicks, but it could've looked a wee bit better.


Now we come to the transformation, which is a little tricky but not too bad. I like to pop the rotor off first, and then hold the landing gear on the tail back to make it easier to pull the entire rotor assembly out of the body. This will be a neat spinny-blade weapon for Quickstrike in his robot mode. With that out of the way, fold open a pair of black "clips" near the cockpit, pull the legs down and twist the waist all the way around. Flip the missile launchers around the skirt armor so they're facing the right way. Fold the whole waist down against the tail, and then fold open the arms. Pull down the chest, fold the nose in and bring up the head until it snaps firmly into place. Fold the chest down in so it meets the waist and snaps into place. Fold arms back in to close them up. Open the forearms and swing the machineguns around to expose the hands instead. To use the weapon, pop the rotor back on the assembly, and unfold a peg on the assembly itself. It fits nicely in either hand. Pushing down on the black "stick" will make the rotor spin just like it did in vehicle mode.

This is the basic robot mode and it looks pretty nice. Articulation is great. The legs have some great range of motion. The legs can swing out, fold up and back, the knees bend and the legs turn at this joint. The feet can fold up and down and they even swivel at the ankle! The tail from the helicopter mode can get in the way of some poses, but it also serves as a stabilizer, which will become very important once we get to the Brute Mode. The arms have great articulation as well. Shoulders move up and down, the arms can swing out, bend and rotate at the elbow. The only problem is that the shoulders tend to detach from the main body a little easily, but it's a fairly minor nuisance. The hands cannot rotate, but they can swing up and down as a result of the mechanism to change between hand and machinegun. The head can rotate nicely as well, and clever fans will note that it has some pseudo "up and down" movement as a result of its transformation.

Basic Robot mode gets an 8/10. Good articulation and fun gimmicks. No real grating downsides, but nothing incredible either.

And now we get to the Brute Mode, and what a mode it is. This is done by sliding the backpack assembly (silver side forward) down onto the back and snapping it into place. You'll need to swing the skirt armor out a bit though because the thrusters on the main backpack drop down a bit too low. This is just as well though, as I like to pose my Transformers with the legs spread out a bit. Having them stand up straight just looks..unnatural to me.

Here, the cannons on the top of the backpack can swing down, and of course, the legs (now arms) from the walker retain all the same mobility as they did before. It looks really impressive. You can use them as over-the-shoulder cannons, under-the-arm cannons, stabilizer legs, or even just as extra thrusters for the backpack. The only limit is your imagination! The backpack gives Quickstrike some very imposing bulk and looks mighty impressive.

The one downside is the electronics. A button is placed right behind Quickstrike's head, and if you've got the head folded all the way up, Quickstrike. Will. Constantly. Activate. The machine gun sound. One of the first things I did was yank out the batteries. Sounds and lights aren't important to me, but if you want to keep them in, prepare for some annoyances. Of course, by keeping the head tilted down a bit more than normal, you can avoid some frustration. You might want to keep it tilted down a bit anyway, because with the head folded up, it's almost impossible to turn side to side as it pushes against the backpack a little.

Brute Mode gets a 10/10 without the electronics in. It's a whole lot fun to pose and play with.

Overall, Energon Quickstrike gets a 10/10 in my book. It's a very fun Transformer and, from what I've heard, one of the best, if not THE best in the Energon line. Whether you like Quickstrike's red or Bulkhead's green, you owe it to yourself to get at least one of them.

 

It's a fantastic, very very good repaint that gets too little respect.

 

I Think I wanna Buy this figure now, Maybe along with energon springer.

 

There is one really good feature you forgot to mention about the electronics,when you push the small red buttons on the back of the walker unit they make the original transformation sounds from the original cartoons and to my knowledge this is the ONLY transformer evaer made with this feature.

 

Quite a few TFs have those SFX. Overload and his repaints do, the original paints of this mold Bulkhead does, I think there's a few others (I want to say Energon Landmine but not 100% sure if that is true)

 

both cybertron scourges have this sound effect too.

 

Energon Landmine does not have any electronics.

 

He sure as hell does, why do you think that backpack is so blocky?



I still hate myself for skipping this guy, I love his paint scheme and what not, and the chicken walker just makes the mold a sell.
DN

 

Well, I'll be jiggered. You're right. My mistake. I guess I just didn't notice any kind of button or anything on him.

 

I LOVE the Bulkhead mold. The decos are equally great in my opinion.

Best helicopter mold ever, including Movie Blackout.

 

I just got Quickstrike after a long and arduous wait, trying to find one for a reasonable price. I already have Bulkhead, so I knew what I was getting into, I just knew I'd prefer the Red & Black over the PseudoSpringer of the original deco.

Something that puzzles me to this very day, however...

On Bulkhead/Quickstrike's tail assembly, there are two holes -- one on each side. They're obviously there for a reason, my question is: What?



As far as I can tell (And oh how I've tried) there's no way his extra bits can fold back to hit the holes, and he doesn't have any sort of accessories that might fit there... Standard energon weapon pegs ALMOST fit in the holes, but the holes are so close to other parts on every side that there's almost no way to reasonably mount anything there -- and this is coming from someone who was THERE for Armada, and routinely slapped a sports car onto the side of a tank...

Edit: I just tried sticking an Energon crystal on his arm, and it fit...with enough force. And I noticed a few more of those "energon-sized" holes on his body... But I still don't know what would fit where...maybe I need to dig through my parts bucket and see what can go where...hmmm...

 

Yanno, I'm really sorry I ended up passing this guy up back in the day. He was around when I wasn't seriously into collecting, and just picking up random toys (aside from E. Downshift, I loved the Wheeljack colorscheme), and he ended up getting passed up when I simply decided I was going to buy an Ultra-class toy (I got Landquake, which I do NOT regret, that toy is awesome).

Sounds like I wouldn't have come out disappointed in either of the two I was thinking about. I DO like this color better than Bulkhead - maybe I'll go looking for him at some point.

 

I need Bulkhead and this one too!

 

why does quickstrike have the japanese characters painted on and bulkhead does not....and does anyone know what they say?????

 

my guess is "sky emergency team"
or something of that nature..

 

Close! I asked one of my Co-workers fluent in Chinese (He lived there most of his life, he should know) and he said it translates, literally, to something like "Air Defense Commander or Air Defense Leader." I can't paste the characters here for whatever reason, but when punched into any of the online translators it says "Air Defense Officer"

So there you go. Perhaps Quickstrike outranks Bulkhead.  

 

BTW this is pretty good for identifying kanji if you have no real knowledge of Japanese. Then you can string them together and run them through a translation page, since kanji in certain combinations sometimes take on a different meaning than their individual meanings.

 

I always thought it was a bit weird that the US edition of Quickstrike would have japanese text on his tail.

At one point I had both Quickstrike and Bulkhead... I ended up selling Quickstrike to a friend because at that point in my collecting, I felt silly having 2 versions of the same mold.

Man, I regret it now... I've since ended up with -another- Bulkhead (part of an ebay lot), AND the KO desert camo version of that mold... but no cool red + white rescue version.  

And yeah... for the record, Energon Landmine does also have the G1 transform noise in his soundbox. Personally, I think EVERY TF with a sound feature should have that as one of their sounds... much better than some of the sound effects they use instead...  

zmog

 

I always thought it silly to paint an obvious war 'copter in rescue colors. *shrugs* take your extra bulkhead and paint it up as vortex. I will at some point.... but not before he gets modified for the obvious reason