I like to army build in my collections, though I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s a holdover from my early childhood playing with buckets full of green army men. It might have to do with all the stories of my youth featuring heroes fighting through hordes of faceless and nameless soldiers. Whatever the reason, this is one of the more army builder fan friendly action figure sets I’ve got in a while. Let’s take a look at the crooked Ninja Turtle Gang member and Rock Soldier!
The box is what we’ve come to expect from this line and features some lovely cartoon style art and an interesting cross-sell.
The set comes with a ton of weapons for your troops including two blaster rifles, a laser pistol, a grenade, two ninja stars, nunchaku, a spear, a flail, a sword, an ooze container, and extra hands (fists and grip for the Rock Soldier and chop, open, grip and fists for the Crooked Ninja Turtle).
The two rifles are pretty similar with the main difference being one has a scope. I like the variety and both fit in the figure’s hands easily and securely. The rock soldier’s right hand is shaped perfectly for guns and the left is slightly open, so he does a two-handed rifle carry well.
The pistol and mutagen container are repaints of accessories we’ve seen in the line, but I believe the grenade is new. I want to say it was a Triceraton weapon, but I’d have to go back and look it up. The grenade and the mutagen container both fit well in the figure’s left hand.
The weapons are enough to outfit a fairly large Crooked Ninja Turtle Gang as seen in their episode and work well in the figure’s grip hands. I really like the variety of poses the extra fist, chop and open hands allow.
Sculpting is really fun on these. The Crooked Ninja Turtle Gang member is such a simple design of a guy in a t-shirt and karate pants, but they boosted the detail a little with some raised turtle shell texture and 3D depth around the eyes of the bandana that makes it pop.
The Rock Soldier has a beefier build than the Crooked Ninja Turtle and also has a lot of nice rocky texture on all the individually sculpted rocks making up his body. He’s a bruiser and his dead eyes are a little scary.
The figures are well articulated with:
- Swivel/hinge shoulders, wrists, elbows (the Rock Soldier has double swivel/hinge elbow), hips, knees (Rock Soldier only) bandana (Crooked Ninja Turtle only) and ankles.
- Double hinged knees (Crooked Ninja Turtle only)
- Ball and socket torso, lower neck, and head
The ball joints in the head and neck make for great range of motion and expressive tilt while the torso ones are a little less effective. The Crooked Ninja Turtle’s ball joint is underneath the overlay of his shirt and the Rock Soldier is thick, so the crunch range isn’t as nice as the the tilt. The Rock Soldier’s lower torso has a soft overlay which allows the hips more range than I was expecting.
The paint is lovely on these two as it always is with this line with super clean, matte finishes and well placed black lines. Overall, I love this set. The Foot Soldier is the army builder standard for the Ninja Turtles property, but these guys are also a lot of fun. Even though the Crooked Ninja Turtle Gang appears only once in the show, I like the idea of them as another lower level faction in the street wars of the TMNT cartoon world. If you got Smash, he looks fantastic flanked by a few Crooked Ninja Turtles as does Granitor and General Traag with a couple of Rock Soldiers. I think I need at least three sets myself.
Thanks to NECA for sending this set along for preview and special thanks to Trevor for letting me borrow some more for these pics!
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Source: Fwoosh
