Mini-Warriors Rager
& Spray Review

NoisyDvL5

I never head Huffer as a kid, so I decided to open Rager first. The figure’s molded in bright, vibrant yellow & blue and that pretty much sold me right there. I love bright colors on toys. The paint work on the grill, lights, and windows is also super sharp which made me like him even more. Overall, the design of the little semi truck, the giant exhausts and all, is really fun. He’s one of the few times I find myself tempted to display him in his alt mode

The transformation is pretty straightforward (no instructions are included) and afterwards you end up with a 3” tall bot that has some impressive “guns”. The robot mode also looks good in blue & yellow, but he does seem a little plain (luckily Reprolabels has stickers for that). The head sculpt is nice and well painted, but it’s the articulation that wins me over here. Ball-jointed shoulders, elbows, & hips, swivel waist, and hinges at the wrists, knees, and ankles. Some of these exist for the transformation process, but they serve great as a robot articulation too. The head is also on a ball-joint, but the design leaves the head in the “cavern” of the cab, so I usually have to move it with a pen tip or paper clip to pose it precisely.

Rager also included two pistols that look like a cross between a blaster and a six-shooter. They look great with him and contribute to this idea of his thinking he’s a little bad ass (that secretly longs to be as big as Prime & Magnus). My only knock on them is that there’s nowhere to store them in truck mode. (I should also note that Rager has already had some repaints. Check out Shafter at Battle Grip and Black Rager at TFSource for a look at those two toys.)

Happy with Rager, I moved on to Spray. Looking back, Spray may have been doomed from the start. I think Spray is mostly as technically proficient as Rager, but Seaspray was a beloved childhood toy & character (plus he was voiced by Alan Oppenhimer!) and it seems to have raised the bar higher.

In vehicle mode, Spray just doesn’t seem “solid” enough. The legs fold up into the chest to pull everything together, but there are a lot of little gaps created. It’s also difficult to have the pontoons lined up to look as sleek as a hovercraft should. The gist is here – it’s identifiably a hovercraft (no decade seems to have loved the hovercraft as much since the 80s, such a shame) and again I love the bright colors, but I would’ve liked to see a more solid presentation in this mode.

In bot mode, Spray did win me over a little more. The transformation is again straightforward (and nostalgic). In robot mode, Spray excels beyond his roots and delivers a nicely articulated rendition of the character. He stands taller than Rager at 4”, thanks largely to his spoiler & propellers. Spray has ball-joints at the shoulders, elbows, waist, hips, & ankles and hinges in his knees. The ball-jointed head is like Rager in that it has good range, but you don’t mess with it too much based on where it is. His hips are somewhat blocked by the white chest plate, but the ball-jointed waist helps work around that if you fiddle with the pose a bit.

Spray also includes a trusty harpoon gun. It’s not as cool as Rager’s blasters, but accessories are always nice. Again it’d be nicer if there were somewhere to stow it on the figure, but I digress…

Both of these figures are very nice and I want to say that iGear really seems to be at the top of their game on third party Transformers, but they’re the only company I’ve bought anything from so far. My lack of experience in this area doesn’t make iGear’s output any less impressive though. And these are two are a great jumping on point for what seems to be a promising Mini-Warriors line. iGear has two more out do this month, UFO & Hench. Those two are a little bigger and more expensive, but I’ll be buying.

I’m going to wrap up with one more mention of Tranforming Collections, Sunday is the last day to signup for the Kickstarter! If you’ve been under a rock, the Transforming Collections Book will feature a host of these Third Party Transformers and be a great resource for casual fans like me & third party collectors alike. The project will be greenlit as it’s well over the minimum and reaching for some incredible stretch goals. There are currently no plans to release the book beyond the Kickstarter, so sign up now to make sure you get a copy! If you do, you’ll also be helping out yourself and those of us who have already signed up to hit the stretch goals and get a few more goodies including making the book even bigger & badder. Go!

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38 thoughts on “Mini-Warriors Rager
& Spray Review”

  1. Pingback: » It’s All True Review – Mini-Warriors Rager and Spray Transforming Collections

  2. how does they stack up, QC wise? plastic feels solid, articulation is generally tight, etc…? QC is the area i think i worry about most w/ any purchase from a new company (new to me, i mean) thanks to my exposure to knockoff toys. some companies go the mile and are every bit as solid as the real deal but some totally phone that in and they’re a disaster in plastic.

    1. Plastic is great. iGear’s Mini-Warriors — these two so far — are both fantastic pieces. Rager’s my favorite of the two (and I now have three versions of that mold).

      1. I hate being that guy that wants to line up the “mold rainbows”, but I’m beyond jealous that you have all three!

        I’ll be living the dream through your book though. 🙂

      1. it’s always good to hear that. i love it when a company really takes pride in their work and does things right.

  3. THIS is my main Transformers Classics Seaspray. Robot mode is fantastic, as is plastic quality. The hovercraft mode is good, but could fit together a little more seamlessly. But I love this series. They’re sturdy, beefy figures that actually feel like toys, and I think they’re better than Hasbro’s own take on the minibots. Can’t wait for Beachcomber.

  6. You and I had similar childhoods then — my collection consisted of a lot of smaller Bots. My mother certainly enjoyed spoiling me, but money was tight growing up (heck, still is!). So while I had friends who had the complete set of Constructicons, Soundwave and all his tapes, I had little guys like Sea Spray, but even to this day he is still one of my favorite TF’s.

    1. Yep, exactly. I had tons of cassettes, but never had Soundwave or Blaster. And I feel like the only guy on the planet who didn’t have Devastator sometimes.

      My parents did really spoil me one year with Defensor & Bruticus. That was an awesome Christmas (and Primus help me if TFC makes a Defensor…)

    2. Much later I found Soundwave at a yard sale or flea market… the guy was loose as hell, had no accessories, and his tape deck cover was broken off… no cassettes either, still, so happy just to have Soundwave.

      One mini-Transformer I still have memories of getting today was Backstreet.

      http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Backstreet

  8. Nice review. These guys are great little mini-bots. As much as I like my Voyager class and larger figures it’s the mini-bots that get the most play. The sturdy little punks fit easily into my camera bag and make great subjects for impromptu photo shoots while out hiking. I’m definitely looking forward to Gears and Cosmos that should be releasing soon.

    For more mini-bot fun y’all should check out Perfect Effect’s Scouting Force X. Best 3rd Party notReflector toy I’ve seen.

    1. They do a lot of copyright infringing, most notably with their “masterpiece” lines. I’m all for 3rd parties, even if they use someone else’s design (Mastermind Creations using Guido Guidi’s Hearts of Steel Shockwave comes to mind), as long as it’s something obscure that Hasbro hasn’t/won’t do.

      3rd parties need to have creativity if they wan’t to get away from the stigma that some people have of them being a negative part of the hobby, and unfortunately iGear’s originality isn’t the greatest :(.

  12. These look like cool updates, but out of my price range.

    I had Huffer, and I recall he was pretty basic transform: legs pulled out, smokestacks pulled out and flipped for arms (backwards looking as they were), and the cab shifted up and pegged into the shoulders to reveal the head. His only real point of note was that he was a mini-Prime or even Mini-Magnus. I do recall him in the cartoon helping out ONCE by hauling a severely injured Optimus’ trailer back to the Ark. Beyond that, he was just another grunt.

    I had a mix of the classic TFs: Prowl (cuz dad was a COP!) and Starscream were my first at Xma$. One “came from Grandma”, but we had found the presents weeks before and I had already removed the catalog to pore over right away! LOL
    Prime came the following summer at my birthday and I think I had a couple mini-bots by then, including Laserbeak/Rumble and later the lion/dude pair and the ape-combo, but I never did get Soundwave or Blaster, even tho I was practically begging for SW the next Xma$. I think that’s the year my mom raided, er, “borrowed” from my savings account from my fair money to buy me my Apple //c? (with BUILT IN DISK DRIVE!!! which we also found early! LOL but hey, Firstborn got to buy his first car that year. sisters were SOL, tho.)

    btw, did anyone else notice Target upped the deluxe price from $14.99 to $15.49? I had finally talked myself into buying WFC Shockwave, too! might as well save a few pennies at WM, now. Still not sure about WFC Jazz, tho.

      1. It’s the economy. Raw materials, labor, and shipping costs have been climbing constantly; I deal with this at work all of the time and it’s a huge pain.

  13. Dude Noisy, Grapple’s all askew. The big panels can swivel to behind his shoulders and those flaps on his forearms fold flush against them. I can understand why Huffer’s looking at him funny.

    As for the iGear’s offerings, I too got acquainted through their great Kup head. I got these two little pieces of awesome, and will likely get sucked into getting Cogz and UFO too. I picked up their Weapon Specialist, and it’s basically the Ironhide Hasbro refused to give us times ten. I’m a bit in agreement with daytime ninja regarding their “masterpiece” figures, as they’re so blatantly shrinks of Hasbro sculpts, but it’s almost sad that they’re so much more capable when they do their own designing.

  14. Excellent review, and great pictures. I own both of these, and look forward to the UFO and Hench arriving soon. The plastic quality on these two is sturdy and very good, the engineering pretty damn good, and really, the only thing that would improve these is weapons storage capability. I had no idea they made other repaints of these, which is cool, but I’m content with what I have. (When and whence did the term “colourways” emerge, anyway? Suddenly, everyone seems to be using it. Did I miss a meeting?)

    I used to object to these third-party toys, for the usual intellectual property infringement reasons, but a few things changed my mind.

    Firstly, Hasbro ain’t in any rush to make these characters. We’ll see a bazillion more versions of Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Megatron, and Starscream before we get one of our inexplicably favourite background characters from when we were kids or “the ones we need to complete the reconstruction of the roster.” Also, when they make cool, easy-to-produce, team-completing characters as exclusives that are only available to Americans . . . that ain’t cool.

    Secondly, when Hasbro does make a character that isn’t one of “The Big Four” I mentioned above, they often do it . . . weirdly, and never again, unless there’s a new series or movie coming out, and then in a wildly different style. I honestly can’t be bothered with transforming the “Universe” Ironhide and Ratchet, they’re so fiddly and bizarre. So I’m planning on saving up and splurging on the third-party versions next year, perhaps for my birthday. And the Baysplosions version of Outback . . . not my goblet of mead.

    Thirdly, the quality of these non-Hasbro, non-Takara robots is getting amazingly good, vastly improved the from deformed, crumbly, frangible knock-offs of two or three decades ago. I only ever owned Inferno and Twin-Tiwst as a kid, but always wanted a Devastator. Now I own an almost two-foot-tall unofficial look-alike, of a quality that beats some official products, and with more articulation at every level than I thought possible. With each individual robot as big as a Voyager-class figure, slap six of ’em together, and you have something that’s bigger and heavier than a baby. That’s some serious toyage.

    Fourthly, now that there is some competition for our collecting funds, mayhap it will make the big companies start taking notice of what we want, especially if we show them we’re willing to pay a ridiculous price for something they could have made, only cheaper. The competition may be good for the hobby.

    Finally, for many reasons, I’m bitter and want to lash out. So I’m petty. But I have neat toys. };D

  15. I have these two guys and wish I could get the others coming up. They take their 80’s predecessors up quite a few notches and are far truer to the cartoon versions than Takara’s early stuff ever proved to be.

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