Bot Reviews: Transformers: Haslab Omega Prime: Part 4: Final Assembly

It’s been a long, long road, plowing through this giant box of toys that miraculously arrived on my doorstep, all thanks to HasTak’s bad luck, and the incredible generosity of Miner Edgar, who, again, you need to check out on Bluesky and Tumblr, for his excellent art. Here’s the first, second, and third parts of my long, long look at the individual bors in this set. Finally, though we’ve reached the end of the set, the capstone of the project, the final combination, Omega Prime.

In the lore of the Robots in Disguise anime, this combined form of Optimus and Magnus was originally created by accident, a side-effect of one of Magnus’s attempts to steal the Matrix. Despite finding the idea of combining with his hated brother deplorable, the pair would naturally form Omega Prime a bunch more times, especially after Magnus gave it up and had a face-turn. In terms of personality, Omega had the best traits of both bots, with none of the drawbacks. The same can’t be said for the original toy, though, which was a floppy, unstable, topheavy mess.

Let’s see if the new version can do any better. But first, some roads, and some stands.

Some Roads, and some Stands

This is an odd extra pack-in thing that this whole box comes with, and I really wasn’t sure where to put it in this multi-part review, so why not here? 

So, the road part of it is two big solid chunks of gray plastic, with a few connectors and adapters that you need to install out of the box. Click them together, and you have a street, meant to resemble the highway of the Global Space Bridge, the underground network that the Autobots used to quickly travel across the globe on the show.

The thing is, though, those streets had color to them, instead of being solid gray, making the stretch of pavement look different enough that I wouldn’t have clocked what it was supposed to be without designer commentary. At least it’s a big, wide stretch of street, large enough to serve as a display space for multiple cars.

That said, it’s really only big enough for a single one of the two bots in this set to rest on it in vehicle mode, but then again, they’re big trucks. Still, I do look at it and kind of wish there was actually enough road to drive them up. 

Luckily, there’s a second use for this road. Split it back into its two halves, and you can install a big plastic stand into each of them. These stands have multiple 5-millimeter ports on them, designed to plug into different holes on the, uhh, pelvises of the bigger bots in this set.

And each stand has an extra little chunk you can clip onto it, strictly to give you more angles you can attach the two main bots to, mostly for the sake of Ultra Magnus. 

The stands do their job well, they’re nice and durable, and you can get a lot of good midair posing out of them.

Plus, you can install the stands facing either direction on the road, depending if you want the base to rest in front of, or behind the figure.

If I have one criticism, it’s that these stands really only work with Optimus and Magnus, thanks to the connections being 5-millimeter. See, a lot of modern Transformers include ports somewhere around their nethers that are designed to work with generic figure stands, but those kinds of pegs are smaller than 5 millimeters, and are also something not typically sold within the Transformers brand. Not making these stands compatible with that system feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, given how many other Transformers they’d then be able to work with. And there’s even a separate little adapter chunk that could have been used for that purpose!

Really, this road/stand combination aren’t bad, they’re just kind of…bland? Which is funny, since they were one of the HasLab’s stretch goals. I keep forgetting they exist, largely because they don’t really fit into my current display and photo space. So, they’re kind of value-neutral.

But enough tiptoing around it, it’s time for the final assembly! 

The Omega Prime Combination

There’s a little combination gimmick here with Omega’s forearms, and it’s a neat bit of storytelling. See, you’re supposed to have Optimus and Magnus shake hands, with Magnus’s thumbs going into Optimus’s fist-holes. And from there, Magnus’s forearm splits, unfolds, and fits over Optimus’s, to form Omega Prime’s hand.

It’s a neat idea, but in practice, it’s just impractical enough that I don’t “canonically” make it a part of the combination when I do so.

It’s easier to just start with the core Optimus on his own, by doing the same torso extension, head-hiding, and other little adjustments that you do when he’s going into his normal super mode. After that, you tear Magnus into five chunks of variable size, and begin reshaping them into armor, before applying them all to the Stretched Optimus.

I will say, this is a bit more complicated than Optimus’s normal super mode armor. His feet, in particular, can be difficult to secure into his new boots.

But once they’re in there, they’re in there, because every part of this guy has multiple tabs in a whole pile of different places to really, really lock them down. And at the end of it, you get…

Omega Prime

I was unprepared for how large this man is. See, because it’s just the core Optimus robot wearing a different set of armor than his normal Super mode, I mentally pictured him as being about the same size as that Super mode. That is not the case. He is so much larger, so very large.

So, right now, Omega Prime is the second-largest freestanding Transformer that I own, with only the ludicrously lanky Supreme Cheetor eclipsing him. Admittedly, I don’t own any Titans, or any other Large Guys like Commander Jetfire, so he is cheating a bit.

But still, I want to emphasize how big this guy is. Not only is he tall at the head, he’s got a big backpack, including wings, making him even taller, especially if you pop Bluebolts onto the top of him, as the instructions say.

Not only is he tall, he’s also wide and deep. There’s mass to him. And it catches your eyes. Like a black hole, he draws your vision to him. You suddenly understand why he’s very expensive. 

Sculptwise, he’s a bit on the busy side, since Optimus and Magnus were both slathered in sculpting, and it’s all layered on each other, but it feels right for a bot this big. The general aesthetic of the sculpt is a bigger, badder version of his solo Super Mode, a knight with a tabard, but more greebled up. The chromed-out truck front from Ultra Magnus forms a winged chestplate that gives him a stable point of visual interest, and while he’s got humungous backpack-and-wings combo, that just means he’s got a silhouette you can immediately read.

That pesky robot head with the chrome ears that are impossible to fold away sees use in this mode, and I’ll admit, it’s an impressive sculpt, basically taking the Super Mode Optimus head and making it seem a bit more “evolved.” 

His colors are similarly pretty complicated, since it’s both robots smooshed together, and has every color each solo bot had, but spread out. Basically, he’s multiple different shades of red, white, and blue, distributed fairly evenly across him. Plus, he’s got all the silver, gray, and yellow bits the solo robots had, too. That worrying chrome from Magnus is back in full force, too, as his chestplate, meaning it’s located right where it feels like it’s most likely to chip, if he were to take a tumble. The chestplate looks nice, in blue, silver, black, and gold, particularly with the big Autobrand, but my memories of the self-destructing chrome from the turn of the millennium still haunt me. The gold chrome ears, and blue chrome eyes look nice, though.

Let me get into the build quality of this guy, because it’s an important part of this update. Back in the day, I’m pretty sure I only built the original Omega Prime once, and my overriding memory was just that he was unable to stand under his own power. I probably just needed to try harder, but still, he was just too floppy, too loose, too topheavy to be any fun. 

Well, they finally fixed that with this guy, because he passes the “can I stand unassisted easily?” test. And with flying colors, too. I can poke him with my finger, and he wobbles back into standing position, like he’s got suspension. He can even support standing in poses where his feet are uneven. Now, he’s not the most stable. He can and will topple over from his weight if you get too daring with his poses, and I’d call him more likely to fall over than any of the uncombined bots that make him up. And, most critically, I couldn’t actually get him to pass the “stand on one foot” test, just the walking pose in the above photo. However, he’s stable enough unless you’re going out of your way to make him unstable, and pose him in really tricky ways. And if you really want to do that, well, you can always use one of the provided stands. 

He also passes the “pick him up and shake him” test, with none of his armor threatening to fall off, thanks to the sheer amount of places it’s pegged in. Honestly, “Omega Prime but he’s now stable and solid” is a great achievement just on its own. By the way, when you pick him up, he’s a heavy guy. I could probably do some very light bicep curls with him. 

As for his articulation, it’s mostly the core Optimus bot’s joints being re-used, but still, let’s go bottom to top. He’s got sideways ankle tilts on his feet, and the rest of his lower torso has Optimus’s tightly ratcheted universal knees and hips, and thigh swivels. He only has millimeters of waist articulation, because of his backpack and tabard, but he *does* have an ab crunch, shockingly.

Uptop, he’s got new Omega Prime hands that have the same wrist swivels, opposable thumbs, and mitten joints of Prime’s Super Mode hands, but now he’s got additional knuckle joints. His arms have the same universal elbows and shoulders as Optimus, and make use of his inner pectoral joint to have a bit of a…chest crunch? Shoulder crunch? His arms can move forwards, whatever you call that. Finally, his head’s on a pretty good balljoint, and you can lift up the panel his neck’s on to cheat him looking down a bit more, though he can’t actually see past his huge chest.

I will say that I feel disinclined to pose him as elaborately as Optimus or Magnus. He’s just bulky enough that he doesn’t feel like he ought to be bendable and flexible, and he’s just heavy enough to make me worry a bit about more elaborate poses. Granted, between his stability and his stand, this is mostly unfounded, and it’s just a feeling he gives off. 

So, for accessories and features, the official robot mode has Bluebolts mounting right above his head, attaching to what used to be Ultra Magnus’s armpit-braces, for a fully spread-out weapons array.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from popping her out, and weaponizing her across him.

He’s certainly got the pegs for it. I count 22 ports on his body, ranging from the clever (he, again, has ports on the back of each of his hands) to the pointless (is anyone going to put anything on the bottom of this man’s shoes?). Plus, there’s 10 5-millimeter pegs on him, too, in sensible places like the backs of his wings, and the sides of his legs. 

His biggest accessory, though, is actually the largest thing in the box: An absolutely gigantic sword, called the Matrix Blade.

Now, to be clear, this is a big guy. But his sword’s even bigger than he is. It still doesn’t eclipse Supreme Cheetor, but it’s many times the length of Omega. It’s big enough to pass for a small shortsword in my Large Adult Hands, and I’ve managed to make some Power Rangers-esque air-whooshes chopping it through the atmosphere. 

The blade’s got some lore to it: On the show, Omega Prime only gained it in the final episode, via channeling the willpower of all of the Earth’s children (look, it’s an anime, it happens).

The original toy of the sword was actually a repaint of the Master Sword, an accessory that came with the Japanese release of the original Fortress Maximus in the 80s. You could only get the sword in Japan from a prize campaign, or later on, by buying a special Omega Prime giftset made up of transparent repaints of the ‘bots. So, it being casually available here is a cool bonus. This sword’s a totally new tooling, and not a repaint of the new Master Sword that came with some versions of the newer Titans Return Fortress Maximus.

The blade itself’s a big broadsword, with an extremely long, staff-like hilt. It’s cast in black, gray, and purple on the top, with some silver paint, including characters in Cybertronian that spell out “till all are one.” 

There’s one big problem with the sword, though: It’s not very stable. You need to assemble it out of the box, and it’s all held together with 5-millimeter pegs and holes that love to come out. It’s not going to fall apart when you hold it, or swing it, but still, it’s fallen apart on me more than once, which is a bit disappointing. There’s a temptation here to just glue it together. 

To hold it, you fit it into Omega Prime’s hand, which conveniently has three ridges on its palm. At multiple points on the huge handle, there’s grooves that they fit into.

And just like the sword itself, it’s not as stable as I like. He can hold it neutrally just fine, but try to do any kind of complicated pose with it, including two-handed ones, and you’ve got to contend with it tumbling out. I’ve seen plenty of people do elaborate swordfighting poses with it, but I find it a struggle to do so.

Still, it’s effectively a (very) large bonus, and doesn’t really impact my enjoyment of the core robot, which didn’t used to come with this, anyway. 

Speaking of that core robot, if I didn’t make it clear previously, there’s a big part of the buffalo that doesn’t get used here: The armor that makes up Optimus Prime’s super mode just has to hang out in base mode, since it’s not a part of the combination, and the same goes for Cerebros.

However, I’ve seen lots of custom configurations for this guy that figure out ways to strap all of that armor on him, usually called “Super God Fire Convoy.” Maybe I’ll give a combination a shot, call it “Super Omega Prime.” 

Overall

For all my grousing, this is still an exceptionally-engineered Huge Robot, if only because of how solid, stable, and poseable he is. Just the fact that I can stand him there, in a little bit of a battle pose, and have him hold together, even if I prod him, is exceptional.

And that’s all he really needed, because the original was such a good-looking super robot, and this faithfully replicates it, but gives him the engineering quality to live up to the design. Sure, they could have, like, not chromed his chest, or given him a better sword, but at the end of the day, they Did The Thing with him, and the result’s pretty glorious. 

The Whole Shebang Overall:

Gosh. Four entire reviews, months of time, and we’re at the end of it. how’s this entire big box stack up? Truth be told, this is an odd one to review to begin with, because you either ordered one and have it already here, are somehow still waiting on it, or you’re debating paying insane aftermarket markup. But, I’m nonetheless compelled to chronicle everything. I’m in an odd place with it, given the strange circumstances that netted me a copy, but it means I can, maybe, be a bit more objective, since I’m not trying to justify nearly a (Canadian) grand in spending. 

That need to do a QC fix on him is a huge bummer, right off the top. It’s not the most difficult thing to do in the world, but it’s involved and time-consuming, and it will probably be a shadow that hangs over the whole set. But while it’s not great, there’s more here than that. A lot more, in fact.

You’ve got the best Deluxe Weaponizer ever, an incredible Commander-Class Optimus saddled with a crippling (but fixable) defect, a strange, janky Commander-Class Magnus that only exists because of the power of crowdfunding, a pretty normal Titan Master, some well-designed-if-plain roads and stands, and a huge sword with trouble holding together. I think the bad bits are overshadowed by the sheer goodness of the whole package.

And you know what the biggest impression I’m left with is, the one that I barely talked about individually? I’m glad that this whole set just feels like a *toy*. Usually, when you get into huge, expensive, collector oriented robots, you start entering territory where action figures are fragile fiddly, have pointy, rough, hostile handfeel, and are meant to live on the shelf. This whole set is built like a toy, despite the 15-plus label on the box. You can pose him, take him apart, put him together, and, aside from that chrome, he isn’t going to break, or fight with you. At the end of the day, he’s just *fun*, and I’m very glad that this expensive collector product aimed at whales remembered to be that.

I did the math, and the whole box is at least worth what the Haslab initially cost, since you’re getting two Commander-class figures, a Deluxe, and a Titan Master, plus a bunch of other goodies, so the numbers check out. Well, okay, it feels worth the price in as much as any huge toy can be worth that amount of money in 2025. But either way, if you don’t already have him, you’re probably looking at the aftermarket here. I can’t say whether or not it’s worth what the markup will be, but what’s here is very fun, if you can tolerate the big fix. And if you’re looking at parted-out aftermarket versions, Bluebolts, and a hypothetical Fixed Optimus are the strong bits. I’ll stand firm that both of those bits ought to get re-run on their own, in some form, though. And that, I think, is finally, all I have to say about all this!

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