Marvel Legends X-Men 97 Sentinel review (2025)

The X-Men 97 Sentinel is hardly my first figure of the mutant hunting robots, but it sure looks like this will be the definitive one for a Marvel Legends collection. This version marked the first for Hasbro’s new made to order format, which eschews the HasLab setup that requires a certain threshold to get made and cranked out enough based on the orders with some extras for latecomers.

Let’s see if the X-Men 97 Sentinel delivers or if collectors don’t need to bother hunting it down.

Packaging: Hasbro comes up with some very cool packaging for their deluxe offerings. The X-Men 97 Sentinel is an homage of an homage of the Marvel comic book covers styled like action figure packages.

It’s a fun nod with the trademark Marvel Legends black dominant color with yellow and red accents. The majority of the front is the Sentinel with its accessories as if it were in a plastic tray.

One side features the X-Men 97 Sentinel blasting away while the other is a collage of the X-Men 97 crew. Over on the back is a cool main image of the battle- damaged Sentinel fighting off Cyclops, Storm, Rogue, Gambit and Wolverine. There are some additional pictures of multiple Sentinels — the better to encourage army building. The bottom features the cross sell with the other available X-Men 97 figures.

Likeness: Between Hasbro and Toy Biz, we’ve gotten several iterations of Sentinels even down to the X-Men video game. As robots, they don’t have to stick to any particular model in figure form. The X-Men 97 Sentinel is pretty spot on to the cartoon model, which was very heavily influenced by Dave Cockrum’s take on them.

That’s a good thing as this design streamlined them slightly while losing some of the clunky goofiness of the original design. The helmet/head sculpt has those ridges and slotted panels along the brim, while the faceplate with the sunken eyes and harsh cheekbones sets off the grated mouth perfectly. I really love the wider “moon boots” it has as well.

All of the Sentinel details are sculpted like the slotted collar band, the wider upper chest piece and circular slotted grate and belt. Hasbro’s ML takes a lot of flak too often — and while some of it is deserved — they deserve credit for not taking shortcuts for the Sentinel sculpt and it looks fantastic.

Scale: The X-Men 97 Sentinel is massive. While not as tall as the HasLab Galactus or Giant-Man, it’s still imposing enough that it towers over a regular size Marvel Legends figure. Iceman comes up to the top of its boot while Wolverine is even shorter.

Beyond the Haslab Sentinel, this is the tallest Sentinel we’ve gotten from Hasbro. Its scale is perfect for the line and really makes me wonder if I wouldn’t be better off selling the Toy Biz Sentinels and smaller Hasbro Sentinels to get this more classic-skewing style.

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Paint: The Sentinels have a basic color scheme with their light purple chest, gloves and boots and magenta helmet arms and legs. They sport a peach face plate with shading to accentuate the eyes and “cheekbones.” The red eyes always helped convey a little extra menace with the Sentinels as well.

Hasbro also added some light grey and pink for some of the paneling. There is some refined detail work throughout like the shading around the collar piece and the chest panels.

Given the lack of complex paintwork, it would have been shocking if the Sentinel had serious paint issues, but it’s appreciated that a higher end figure didn’t have problems on that end.

Articulation: With more than 80 points of articulation, the X-Men 97 Sentinel has a crazy amount of articulation. For a big giant robot, it’s not lacking for any reasonable Sentinel movement.

They’re really just big and lumbering so they don’t need to do anything particularly wild with their poses, but it’s nice to see the Hasbro team just pack in a bunch of articulation just because.

They’re able to stoop down fairly low to grab a mutant thanks to all of the articulation in their fingers.

X-Men 97 Sentinel has:

• neck
• shoulders
• biceps
• elbows (double-jointed)
• wrists (hinge)
• fingers (with three points of articulation)
• waist
• thighs
• knees (double-jointed)
• ankles

Accessories: The X-Men 97 Sentinel got more accessories than I anticipated.

First, it comes with additional battle-damaged options. This actually has different levels of damage. The top section of the helmet has a crack exposing the grey “skull” underneath. This piece is removable so you can vary up your Sentinel display and place it on the unscathed faceplate.

It also has a swappable battle-damaged chest plate, which has three slashes from you know who, and exposed wiring spilling out. That’s a fun touch with the cords wrapped around each other.

Finally, it’s got two laser blast effects — one with a short beam and the other with a longer beam.

Worth It? When Hasbro initial opened the pre-order window, they charged $175 for the X-Men 97 Sentinel. For a massive, nearly HasLab-scale figure that’s a pretty decent value.

Perhaps in an effort to motivate more customers to grab these MTO offerings during the pre-order window, Hasbro raised the price to $220. That’s not the most customer-friendly approach as it comes off more like a punishment for folks who were initially unsure about getting it.

Rating: 10 out of 10

The X-Men 97 Sentinel was such a welcome addition to my Sentinel collection and scratches that itch for a classic version of the X-Men killer bots.

Where to Get It? Unlike HasLabs, the X-Men 97 Sentinel is still available at Hasbro Pulse. For a smaller version, the 14″ Titan Hero Scale Sentinel is also available at Amazon.

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