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Saturday 24 August 2013

Ride - Deluxe Evac

"Evac is used to dodging laser fire. His entire life, Decepticons have gotten in his way, and tried to stop him. They've never succeeded. No matter how overwhelming their attack, Evac knows that with Optimus Prime and Bumblebee covering him, nothing will stop him from delivering his passengers safely."

Name: Evac
Faction: Autobot
Continuity: Live Action Movies (I think)
Toy Line: Universal Studios - The Ride
Size Class: Deluxe

Strength: 6
Intelligence: 5
Speed: 9
Endurance: 4
Rank: 5
Courage: 9
Fireblast: 5
Skill: 8
Robot Mode
Evac's robot mode is mostly grey with some silver, black and blue. His visible vehicle mode parts form blue armour plates for him on his chest, shoulders and backpack. His body-type is quite a common one for a car-based Transformer, in that his hood is now his chest, his wheels are found in his shoulders and legs and a large chunk of the vehicle is now on his back.
His torso section's most prominent feature is his vehicle mode hood forming the chest, and his abdominal area featuring a faux-part of his rear thruster (the real thruster is under his head). The rest of the abdominal area is made up of sculpted vehicle parts. An interesting part of this area is his abdominal blasters, which can be folded up/down manually to give him some sort of weapon (since his gun from the prototype has been removed).
The only other thing really to note about his torso section is his backpack, which can be folded out (as shown in my pictures) to give him a sort of cloak or wings.
His head is connected to the top of the torso by a ball joint from what was his vehcile mode thruster that allows the head all sorts of rotational points. The head is silver with a blue helmet and yellow eyes and rear of the head. The face is sculpted with details like a nose, mouth, chin and some definition marks (like on most Movie-based figures).

His upper arms are connected to the tops of the torso by ball joint connectors, leading to his shoulders (which include his rear wheels). The shoulder parts are connected to the main upper arm by a pivoting joint. leading to a hinge-based embow. The rest of the lower arm features no further articulation, but the hands are sculpted to feature a standard sized peg hole, so you can give him someone else's gun if you want to arm the poor fella. Saying that, his arms do feature some arm-mounted lasers (or blow torches or something), but they're just for decoration really. His arms also feature some C-Joints on his mounted cannon-thing and shoulders.

His legs are connected to the torso by his groin area with ball joint connector again, giving it just as much articulation as the arms. His legs should have a pivoting joint just below the tops of them, but due to the placement of the wheels, they cannot actually move. His knees are made up on a hinge joint, leading to his lower legs. His feet are also on a hinge joint of sorts, but i'm not really sure why, it doesn't help with articulation, posing or in his vehicle mode either...it's just there.
The bottoms of his lower legs feature a panel from his vehicle mode on each side, which gives him a winged-foot appearance (ala Hermes from Greek Mythology) possibly giving the impression that he's fast.
Vehicle Mode
Evac turns into (according to his card back) a Supercar, based on the car used in the Universal Studios Ride. This mode is mostly blue with green patterns along the sides, and a silver Autobot insignia on either side. Under his black, translucent canopy, you can see a set of four seats (for his passengers to sit in), which has some nice sculpted details in it, but sadly is inaccessible, as it's pinned shut. The rest of the car mode is mostly sculpted details, like paneling, side mirrors etc. This mode also features a set of four working wheels, which, as to be expected in this age of toy making, are fully able to roll along a smooth surface.
Items of note in this mode's sculpting include his front grill's small gun (helpful for shooting Decepticon's in the shins), his rear thruster (for quick escapes), and a set of small (non-working) lights on his hood, painted with some yellow paint (yet the main headlights are left unpainted, next to them).
One interesting point in this mode, is that Evac still features a small hole on the top of his canopy where his gun (seen in the prototype images) would have gone.
My Final Thoughts
People who know me, know I've been after this figure for some time now, I found him at Auto Assembly this year for £30 and I of course picked him up, and I have not been disappointed so far! He's basically a more advanced version of his Legion class toy (as you'd expect of course) but with some more features and details.
As mentioned a couple of times in my actual review, Evac was supposed to come with a gun originally, but it was removed, most likely at the last minute for some reason as the toy still features the peg hole for it in vehicle mode, and his profile image on the front of the toy's packaging still shows the gun over his shoulder as well. Despite this apparent last minute change, the figure still doesn't disappoint me :)
Something of note about this figure that I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice, is that he looks quite a lot like G1 Skids, as such, if Skids was not about to receive a new Generations toy soon anyway, I;d have said you could just put him on your Generations G1 shelf as him as well!

All in all, I think this toy is great, he was well worth the wait in the end, and sits happily on my shelf with the rest of my "favourites". The one problem with the figure really is that he's so hard to get, the only "legitimate" way is to get it from the Ride's store at Universal Studios, which of course for me would be too expensive, so I'd probably suggest that everyone just buy him the same way I did, on the aftermarket for a much lower price (you know, compared to buying a plane ticket, ticket into the park, paying the store's prices etc)