Toy Wizards Review: NewAge Toys Legendary Heroes Reconnaissance Max

NewAge is on fire. In the short time the company has been an entity they have cranked out some serious contenders for best Legends scaled Transformers to date. This shouldn’t come as a surprise though. Signs are pointing to NewAge actually being a subset of the design team that has made many products for DX9, another third party company well known for creating wonderful Masterpiece scaled toys as well as some Legends. In fact, NewAge uses DX9’s Legends scaled Optimus Prime named Dutch on their packaging with their other offerings! Regardless of who is designing these toys and which factory they are coming from one thing is certain – NewAge is creating mini masterpieces. Today we look at their third release The Legendary Heroes Reconnaissance Max.

Sculpt

Pure Sunbow animation flavor. Generation One’s Cosmos was part of the second wave of mini bots introduced for the show’s second season in 1985. This chunky boy looks like he popped right off the screen and sat down on the carpet for a Moon Pie. It’s really quite something to recreate such an accurate look at this scale.

Paint

This company is really starting to impress me more and more with crisp, clean, amazing paint applications on such tiny little toys. While, yes, the majority of the toy is molded colored plastic, it’s the fine details that are impeccably painted. Keep in mind this toy stands 6.7cm in robot mode. Seeing metallic blue eyes, silver trim, yellow accents, and exterior vehicle lights all done so evenly and without any real bleeding or overspray will make you criticize a company like Hasbro all the more when I can barely find a mass release official Transformer at retail without those issues.

Articulation

Max exhibits the same hyper articulation given to previous NewAge releases. We have ball neck, ball shoulders, ball elbows, wrist swivel, waist swivel, ball hips, ball knees, and ball ankles! He’s surprisingly dynamic despite his proportions. Only the shoulders are hindered slightly by the sculpt.

Accessories

Since Cosmos has weaponry built into his robot and alt modes in the form of those hand blasters, NewAge included a genius way of displaying the toy in vehicle mode. A small clear stand is included that plugs into the bottom of the UFO that resembles a beam of light, a fire in the sky, or a tractor beam in effect!

Alternate Mode

The squat, super deformed UFO that this small robot folds and tucks into is just wonderful. It really is quite seamless and undeniably cute.

Value

We’re seeing a wide range in price points in the field of legends scaled collectible third party toys right now. The scale is becoming increasingly popular and many companies are dipping their toes in the pool. NewAge has kept their product in the $20-$30 for each release/repaint/retool they have offered thus far. I paid $23 shipped for Max here. For the quality this company has now set a standard for and the fun I have paying with each release I have no issues paying that.

Score

4/5 Wizard’s Stars

The bottom line is I cannot wait for each new release from this company. The few in the pipeline include Jazz, a Stepper repaint, an Alternators homage Shockwave from that mold as well, Ironhide and Ratchet, Smokescreen, Silverstreak, Bluestreak, and eventually Megatron. They seem on a fast track to give us a full roster of bots in an amazingly short time. If they can keep this up at this level of consistency and polish, this could be one of the greatest Transformers toy lines ever.

Enjoy the full gallery below!