Transformers Legacy United Gears review

Gears is an Autobot who will always be a sentimental favorite. He teamed with Spider-Man in Transformers #3 and had one of the best episodes of the cartoon series with Changing Gears. He’s also been one of the few holdouts to having a near complete Transformers Season 1 Ark crew, so I was very excited when he was revealed.

That excitement heightened actually having him in hand. Let’s see if the Transformers Legacy United Gears keeps me in a perpetually good mood or grouchy like Gears.

Packaging: The Legacy United series has a less dramatically garish color scheme than the Legacy Evolution series. There’s more blue and darker purple instead of a neon rainbow explosion.

The front has a half open window to see Gears. This setup isn’t great if parts are swapped out as it’d be difficult to see if any accessories are missing.

On the front there’s a big picture of Gears in his alt mode firing away. The left side has a collage of characters although this side of the image is missing Gears. Over on the left side is Gears with a nice close-up portrait and a wider distance shot to show him fully in bot mode.

The rear shows Gears and his accessories and the steps necessary for transformation.

Likeness: Gears is based on his G1 cartoon appearance. The TF team did a great job bringing that look to reality. Gears has always had one of the more unique head sculpts with the two slots breaking up his half-moon face.

With the lack of plastic window, Hasbro posed Gears with his hinged chest panel off, which does give the appearance that it’s missing. Once that’s attached, the figure looks like classic Gears in all of his chunkier glory.

In a nod to Changing Gears, Hasbro sculpted more detail in Gears’ accessible chest piece for the tape slot to fit into. That was how the Decepticons altered his personality to be more agreeable and nicer.

This is one of those deals only die-hard Transformers fans would notice and it’s nice that the designers would incorporate this into the figure.

Alt Mode: Gears changed into a pickup truck. It’s not flashy but fits Gears. His truck bed’s contents have always been a mystery as to what he’s carrying. Let’s just call them supports to help ferry broken down Autobots or Energon loads.

There are some gaps — like the wheel well and the windshield — but it conveys that he’s a sturdy truck that can take some damage.

Given the scale of the truck mode, his wheels seems slightly undersized. The rear is his chest plate making smart use of all of his parts.

Transformation: Gears gets transformed in 12 steps. Like Huffer, his transformation makes sense and will become intuitive after a few times. He was probably the easiest non-cassette to transform in the last two years for me.

Scale: In the cartoon the Minibots were portrayed much shorter and thinner than their fellow Autobots. Hasbro retained their shorter stature but widened them out. That definitely makes sense for characters like Brawn, Huffer and Gears whose alt modes are bulkier and blockier.

Largely sticking to the cartoon scale, Gears is around the same height as Huffer yet taller than Cliffjumper. My Studio Series ’86 Bumblebee is en route so I’ll finally be able to add him to the Minibots roster.

Gears is appropriately smaller but does look like he would have no trouble handling a couple Decepticons while waiting on reinforcements.

In his alt mode, Gears is sleeker than the flatbed Huffer, but is a bit taller.

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Paint: The paintwork on these Transformers is usually stellar. So far, the most consistent issue has been matching colors from the painted sections to the plastic areas specifically yellow paint. Gears doesn’t have any issues since most of the figure is molded in the base color.

The silver sections of his face and chest piece are sharp with no red overspray. Gears’ blue eyes have the same muted shade that would benefit from a brighter shade to give the figures more “life.”

His alt mode has more painted on elements from his larger Autobots logo — done pristinely — and the yellow headlights. Unlike some of the others, Gears already has the blue windows so there’s no need for a more cartoon accurate release in the future.

Articulation: Gears’ articulation is well executed allowing him to hit all kinds of fun poses. His thicker feet allow for easier running poses while smooth hip articulation makes crouching and kneeling poses no problem either.

I was surprised at the ease of getting some of these battle poses off and was definitely impressed.

Gears has:

• neck
• bicep
• ball-jointed shoulders [with butterfly hinge]
• elbows
• wrists
• wrist hinge
• torso
• waist
• hips
• thighs
• knees (double-jointed)

Accessories: Gears wasn’t a character with a lot of accessory options. He does come with a blaster based off the appearance of one he used in the cartoon. It’s a solid blaster with some vent spaces and a large barrel.

The blaster has a handle in the normal position as well as one to the bottom right side. Either can be plugged into the various ports on him for added functionality.

Worth it?  I picked him up for $24.99. That seems like a pretty fair price for Transformers figures so no griping from me here.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Gears has been long overdue, but his figure really shines. The only thing missing was a teeny tiny version of Spider-Man for him to team up with to battle Megatron.

Where to get it?  I’ve seen him several times at Target. He’s up via secondary sellers on Amazon. Entertainment Earth has him up for pre-order.