Bot Reviews: Transformers: Haslab Omega Prime, Part 1: Cerebros and Bluebolts

This is a set of figures that I truly, truly never thought I’d get in my hands, because it’s a Haslab release, Haslabs are ludicrously expensive, and you have to make the choice to spend that big chunk of money pretty quickly. So, if you don’t know, Haslabs are big, pricey Hasbro items, covering brands like Transformers, Star Wars, Marvel, et cetera.

To get a Haslab item, you need to back it, Kickstarter-style, within a limited window, and if it gets funded, it’ll be shipped to you a year or so later. I’ve never backed one, because, well, they would usually set me back at least 500 Canadian dollars after taxes and shipping, and I’ve never been or felt rich enough to shell that much dosh out on a really big action figure. Still, I’ve found myself doing the math on several of them, as I stared longingly at the backer page, and Omega Prime was one of them. 

But this time, I got very lucky. See, apparently FedEx really, really goofed, and some American Omega Prime backers actually received more than one copy of the figure they ordered, without having bought the extra. I know one of those people, reached out, and, well, here it is, something I thought I’d never get to own. By the way, check out Miner Edgar on Bluesky and Tumblr, he’s an amazing artist, drawing Transformers, mecha in general, and Tokusatsu. A scholar and a gentleman, he’s also all around one of the coolest people ever for making this happen. 

So, who’s in this substantial box? It’s Optimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, and a couple of friends, but not as your average G1 Transformers fan knows them. This version of the gang comes from the 2001 Robots in Disguise anime and toyline (called Car Robots when it was out in Japan the previous year).

The story featured Prime and his Autobots defending present-day Earth from Megatron’s Predacons, with the Decepticons as a sub-faction added later on. Despite that change to the premise, the show felt like a return to the basics after years of Beast Wars and Beast Machines.

It was like Sunbow G1, but a lot more anime-infused, and a little bit lighter and softer. The world was in danger less, and there were a few more jokes and gags, courtesy of an excellent English dub. It’s a far, far better show than the Unicron Trilogy animes that followed it, and well worth a watch. Well, worth a watch if you can find it on YouTube, since the dub is trapped in some kind of Copyright Limbo involving Disney, or something. In fact, since there’s no legal release venue, I’m just gonna link this nice playlist of the full series upscaled to 4K.

The toyline, meanwhile, when it wasn’t repainting older stuff, went hard into the Japanese Super Robot motifs, with one of the big centerpieces being Optimus and Magnus re-imagined as two combining Super-class bots, who could fuse to form Omega Prime.

People hold these two vintage figueres in pretty high regard, but my brother and I owned the original (western) releases of the pair back in the day, and we had a lot of problems with them . They had chrome all over them that chipped, they had rubber tires that split, and worst of all, the Omega Prime combination was top-heavy and unstable, to the point where I think I only combined him once.

A modern update fixing these issues is very appealing, even if this new set has issues of its own, as I’ll get into….When I get to him. Y’see, there’s a lot of stuff in this box, and a lot of ground to cover, so I’m going to be splitting this up into a few entries, especially since, if you’re trying to get this on the aftermarket, you might only be interested in parts of it. So, today, I’m going to start with the two unexpected pack-in characters. So, join me as we go through this set, smallest-to-largest thing.

Cerebros

Let’s start with the littlest guy here, Cerebros, or “Plasma” in Japan. The other big centerpiece of Takara’s Car Robots toyline was a repaint of the original G1 Fortress Maximus. However, Max didn’t end up getting released in the North American Robots in Disguise toyline, because it couldn’t pass modern American drop testing safety standards.

But the show was already made, and so the character was still in it. Confusingly, Cerebros wasn’t the mid-stage robot that forms the big guy’s head anymore, but was now a repainted version of the smaller Headmaster Spike figurine that formed the original Cerebros’s head. Either way, on the show, this Cerebros was a semi-sentient plot device that could control the full-sized Fortress Maximus, with a big part of the show’s final story arc involving both factions trying to find and use him to activate the big bot.

This also explains why the little guy is the only bit they included in this set (and definitely means we’re never getting the modern Titans Return Fort Max repainted into him).

The most interesting thing about this new Cerebros, though, is that he’s a Titan Master, as introduced in the Titans Return toyline from 2016. Nine years later, we’re still getting figures compatible with that ecosystem. Well, really, it’s also because he’s a straight repaint of the minifigure from that Titans Return Fort Max.

Either way, if you’ve handled one Titan Master, you’ve handled them all, and this guy’s no different. He’s a tiny little inch-and-a-half tall minifigure, with a blocky design, and the same height and proportions as every other Titan Master. In terms of sculpt, he’s a bit more humanized than these little bots tend to be, with a proper (tiny) face and mouth. In terms of accuracy to the original toy and animation design, he’s a bit limited by his proportions, plus he’s also got a screwhead right where the original’s odd little six-pack abs were. For colors, he’s very accurate to the Car Robots original, though, with a black torso, and red legs and arms, with the arms being done by paint, plus some silver paint on the face and chest. 

One upside of this little guy is his build quality, something that’s very hit and miss on Titan Masters. All of his joints are good and tight, and none of them want to come unclipped, both issues I’ve encountered on his compatriots. He’s got the same articulation as the rest of them, though: Restricted ball-jointed shoulders and neck, and swivelling hips and knees, fused together into a mono-leg. 

For features, if you’ve got any bigger Titans Return figures kicking about, he’s got tiny holes on his feet that he can stand on, and adhere to tiny tabs a lot of them had on their vehicle modes, to ride along. I’ll also skip ahead, and note that there’s spots on the larger figures in this Haslab set for him to ride along. 

His big feature, of course, is folding his legs up, and transforming him into the head of The Emissary, which is what they called the repainted G1 Cerebros (I know, confusing). It’s a decently toy-accurate sculpt, by the way, with a yellow visor, and silver paint picking out his face and the horns around his black helmet. But this set doesn’t come with the larger body, and, spoiler alert, there’s no official way for the head mode to interact with any of the other figures, so he just kinda…sits there, as a disembodied head that can’t even sit flat, thanks to his neck connector. The larger Emissary face has kind of a sad, despairing expression, to my eyes, which is really fitting considering his predicament.

Again, if you have any larger Titans Return figures, he’s still compatible with them, and can form the head of any Deluxe, Voyager, or Leader-class figure from that ecosystem, so you can certainly give him someone else’s body.

My Takara Legends Hot Rod (reviewed here) is what I’ve been using, since their colors kinda-sorta line up.

Cerebros Overall

Cerebros makes for an interesting little pack-in, and including him feels a bit like a mea culpa for the repainted Fortress Maximus not getting re-released in the North America Robots in Disguise toyline back in the day. On the other hand, it’s just the smallest part of the figure, without the rest of the big baseformer, and including him here means that the newer Titans Return Fortress Maximus also definitely isn’t getting repainted and re-released. But also, it’s not like I’d have the space or money to buy that repaint, and I think HasTak knows that the full figure wouldn’t sell, anyway, hence this guy’s inclusion here. 

As for the figurine itself, he’s on the better end of the Titan Masters that I’ve got, mostly because his build quality and paint apps are good and complete, but I could take or leave him as a standalone figurine, and if you’re buying portions of this box piecemeal, he’s an easy pass. 

Bluebolts

Next up, we have the strangest figure in this set, because Bluebolts wasn’t actually in the original Robots in Disguise franchise, but instead comes from a really obscure manga…sort of. Buckle in, kids. 

So, the original Robots In Disguise Ultra Magnus figure had this big, complicated, converting weapon called the Blue Bolts, pictured above. For this update, they decided to add something extra, and give the weapon a robot mode of its own. Sounds simple, right? But they didn’t just make up a new character here.

There’s this online Transformers manga that was published in 2022, called End of G1 Universe, that told a post-apocalyptic story set at the end of time, and starred a black repaint of Lio Convoy, called Dark Amber Leo Prime. You might remember this, because I yakked about it back when I reviewed Legacy Nemesis Leo Prime, who I bought pretty much entirely because of that story, to represent him. Well, Leo’s companion, and the bot who brings him to life in the first place, was none other than Bluebolts, who appeared in the story as a nonexistent blue repaint of Kingdom Maximal Skywarp (reviewed here). By the way, it’s just two short chapters, so here’s a fan-translation of Part 1 and Part 2, if you want to read it real quickk.

And now she’s finally got a figure of her own, in the most unlikely place imaginable. As a fan of the character and story, this is one of those things that felt like it was made specifically for me, and about 10 other people. 

Robot Mode

I’ll start with the headsculpt, because it’s the most important connection to the End of G1 Universe manga. Basically, they took Kingdom Skywarp’s face, with its bird-hat and beak-like mouthplate, and sculpted a Cybertronian version of it instead, replacing the organic details with sleek, mechanical lines, at interesting angles.

It looks good, and makes it clear that this is specifically the bird-bot from that story, before she got her bird mode.

Zooming out, that head’s on a figure that’s more or less the size of a proper, modern Deluxe. Her proportions are strange, in an interesting way. She’s got a slender torso, stompy boots, and incredibly long, beefy arms that end on guns, with big shoulder pylons, and red projections coming out of her wrists.

She makes me think less of a Transformer, and more of a mecha with a vaguely Evangelion-adjacent design sensibility, and I dig it. I also dig how they made sure she wasn’t hollow, save for the backs of her lower legs. 

For colors, fitting her name, she’s mostly two different shades of blue, a darker, navy color, and a brighter, more neon color, mixed in with a couple shades of gray plastic (light on her limbs, dark on her guns), and some red accents (plastic red at her wrists, painted red for the crest on her head.)

She’s also got yellow eyes, and a translucent blue chestplate. It’s a really pleasant layout, and feels very complete. If I had to find a criticism, I’d say that I wished they’d imitated the colors of her manga counterpart a bit better, and given her, say, a yellow headcrest, and blue eyes over a silver face, but what’s here looks slick enough that I can’t really complain.

Her build quality’s the big story here, to me. Basically, this figure feels really nice to handle. The joints are just the right amount of tightness, and she has a decent weight to her. But here’s what makes this especially incredible: Bluebolts is a Weaponizer, that type of figure introduced way back in Siege, where the gimmick is that they break apart into accessories for other figures to use. I’ve reviewed my fair share of Weaponizers over the years (let’s count them up, and link to the reviews: Cog, Zetar, Cromar, Aragon, Centurion, Transmutate, and Road Pig), and one thing they all share in common is parts that’ll easily pop off, since that’s their gimmick. Reader, I tell you, this one’s so well-engineered, that someone who doesn’t know about this feature could pick up and pose her, and not notice you’re supposed to remove her limbs. Well, maybe when posing her shoulders, if you bump one of those pylons against her. 

Speaking of articulation, she manages to have a full suite of it, albeit with some restrictions. Her ankles do tilt, but they’re oddly blocked from tilting too much. She does have toe joints, though, for walking poses. As for the rest of her, you’ve got swivelling knees and thighs, universal hips, a swivel waist, universal shoulders and elbows, and a ball-jointed head.

You can also spin her red wrist pylons, and the guns that form her hands, if you like. Again, she’s impressively complete-feeling.

For features, as a complete robot, she’s got nine 5-millimeter ports across her body, for arming her up, as well as two more inside her hand-guns (one gun’s a machinegun, the other a cannon, by the way).

She’s also got eight five-millimeter pegs, if you want to put accessories on her the other way.

And that’s when she’s together. The big feature is, of course, that she comes apart into 12 little pieces, including in places you wouldn’t expect, like her elbows and waist, all of which expose extra pegs and ports for arming up other figures.

There’s also a pair of extra accessories for her, two little white missiles, which don’t fire, but can fit into the ports on her gun-hands (or any other 5-millimeter port). They’ve got smaller 3-millimeter ports on one end of them, plus extra tabs so you can stash them on her back, which I’ve done in some of these photos. 

Now, I’m not a construction-toy-brained kind of person, I can’t make custom Lego builds or anything, but I’ve armed up enough figures in these reviews that I can just tell that she’s way more flexible at this than any of the other Weaponizers I’ve got, in terms of what you can do with her parts.

I’ve already seen tons of creative builds online (and stole a few of them for these pictures).

The only weird ones are those red wrist-cuffs, they just kind of slip off of her, and don’t have much in the way of obvious connection points. And, again, you can put her back together, and she’s stable and solid enough that you’d never know she’d come to pieces. 

Transformation

On one hand, she’s a partsformer, in that you need to pop her arms off to transform her. On the other hand, the latter-day Weaponizers, like Road Pig, that tried to do no-partsforming transformations, wound up being weaker figures, so I’m not holding it against her. And it’s not much partsforming anyway. Basically, you pop her arms off, then compress the rest of her torso into a big square, before sticking the arms back on in a different spot, and slipping her missiles into new positions.

Easy, peasy.

Weapon Mode

So, this is just a big gun. But an interesting-looking gun! Basically, we’ve got a square platform with a fold-out targeting reticule on top, and two missiles out front, with two additional guns (made from the robot mode) down low on either side. 

Here’s the thing, though: It basically works as a flying spaceship thing on its own, in my mind. I’d call it roughly on par with the Powerdashers in terms of being a Random Space Thing we’re calling a vehicle. Maybe it’s because it reminds me of the spaceships the Decepticons used in the third act of Dark of the Moon. Either way, it looks just cromulent enough to work on its own as a flying altmode. 

The colors are the same, just re-configured, and her lower arms stay pegged on solidly enough.

For features, while it’s as unintended as this being some kind of spaceship, I’ve also found that Cerebros sits pretty nicely behind the targeting reticule, to serve as the pilot. 

That said, this is a weapon that’s meant to be held, and yet, it’s oddly difficult to get figures to hold it, as there aren’t really any downward-facing 5-millimeter pegs that are easily accessible, just some ones facing sideways. But there’s also nothing stopping me from just unplugging and rotating the handles at the back of it, making it a lot easier for figures to grasp it. But doing that means unplugging one of the two connections each gun-arm has, which makes the whole thing much less stable, and those gun-arms more likely to fall out. And it’s a heavy enough weapon that most figures can’t support its weight, anyway. Nemesis Leo Prime certainly can’t!

Luckily, the fact that this is a Weaponizer means you can just forget about this official altmode, and break her up into parts instead. In fact, the instructions also suggest an entirely different weapon mode, where you turn the torso assembly into a two-barreled turret, and hand the arms off to serve as handheld guns.

It’s less solid than the spaceship mode, but it feels more like a prompt to just invent something yourself, which I’ve seen plenty of people do, including giving her bird modes to match her manga appearances. 

Bluebolts Overall

It’s alarming how good Bluebolts is as a standalone figure. She’s easily the best Weaponizer I’ve handled, both in terms of how good she is at being an accessory loadout, but also in terms of being solidly engineered and designed. But beyond that, she’s just a fun, unique, well-designed Deluxe-class Transformer. And that’s before getting into the fact that she’s an unlikely deep cut of a character, thrown into this big box of figures from a whole different series.

In fact, it’s messed up that she’s only available in this set, where she’s going to be overshadowed by the bigger bots around her, despite being such a solid Transformer on her own. It’s almost definitely not going to happen, but she deserves some kind of standalone re-release. I know there’s people out there that just want Bluebolts, and don’t care about the rest of the package, and they’re extremely valid for it. I don’t think she’s worth hundreds of dollars, but she’s worth trying to track down on her own merits.

Coming Up!

Ultra Magnus, some roads and stands, Optimus Prime, the complicated, stressful repair job, the final Omega Prime Assembly, and a really big sword! Definitely split across multiple entries, because I’ve still got a lot of ground to cover! And if you’re interested in seeing me encounter all that stuff on livestream, I did a full unboxing and assembly over four entire episodes of Children of Primus, over on the “Live” tab of our YouTube Channel.

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