Toy Review: Master Made Apollo

MasterMade is continuing to show these other companies how it’s done… but will they listen?

Producer: Mastermade

Price: Approx. $135 USD

Release Date: Sept. 2015

Item Height: Approx. 7.5

Item Weight: Approx. 1.4 lbs (unboxed)

WHERE TO BUY: Amazon

Master Made continues its Mega Series line of robot toys with Apollo who’s their “Super Deformed” (SD) homage to the Transformers character Omega Supreme. Being Super Deformed, this plastic and diecast piece features relatively “squat” proportions but can out-pose just about any other product out there. The sculpting and colors are just incredible with mostly colored plastic and tampoes for logos giving it a very “smooth” feel. It’s extremely “weighty” as well at almost a pound and a half which doubles the weight of a lot of “Masterpiece” scaled transformers toys, even.

On top of an extremely high level of poseability, I love the fact that this thing is jam-packed with gimmicks. his traditional claw and blaster arms actually come off to reveal regular, fully-poseable hands underneath (which is not only genius but looks awesome.) The two weapon-arms can actually combine to become your choice of things like a hammer, arrow, or even a bazooka. His helmet opens up to more clearly reveal his face which actually uses knobs on the sides of the helmet to move his mouth and brow-line for different expressions as. His face and chest also feature super-bright LED-powered light up sections that you could almost use as a flashlight due to just how much it illuminates.

The transformation is incredibly fast (even the transformation video doing it “slowly” is about four minutes long) and it’s alt. mode is pretty damned cool. This miniature version of the traditional Omega Supreme base mode really nails it although by design it doesn’t have all of the playability that the robot mode does.

Not to be discounted is the miniature Optimus Prime figure that it comes with. This non-transforming piece is also featuring the “SD” styling to match Apollo and it’s fun. It’s nice looking and poseable which is all I think can really be asked from an add-on like this.

I don’t really have any gripes with it. Do I think it’s the perfect toy? Nope. However there’s really nothing “wrong” with it. It does a bunch of stuff and does them extremely well.

Overall Score: 9.0/10 – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; Master Made is taking other Third Party companies to town in terms of sheer quality on their products. You can tell that these designers and engineers not only have a strong understanding of the “Transformers” franchise and characters, but really get toys themselves and how to make products attractive to both collectors of Transformers and other genres of toys like Chogokin/diecast and Super Robots. From awesome quality to awesome materials to awesome poseability to awesome gimmicks; outside of dispensing gold bars there isn’t too much that this piece DOES NOT DO. It’s crazy. This is my Third-Party Transformers figure of the year so far and that says a LOT coming off the heels of Maketoys’ Striker Manus. Master Made; they just plain get it.