Botcon 2015 Club Membership Exclusive Deluxe Lio Convoy

Lio Convoy is one of the 2015 Botcon Collector’s Club membership exclusive toy.  It’s a repaint of the recently released Botcon Collector’s Club Store exclusive Nova Prime.  Read my review of Nova Prime here.

Well, let’s just get this out of the way.  Doing Beast Wars characters as vehicles was fine for the Axalon set in 2006, since it made sense that they were vehicles before getting to earth.  But painting any old car into a Beast Wars character just for the hell of it doesn’t make sense, and since Lio Prime was not in Beast wars, it makes no sense.  That aside, they did a nice job painting him.  I like the gold on the rear fins.  I suppose you could say it looks vaguely mane-like.  The head sculpt, which I talked about extensively in my Nova Prime blog, looks a little better in person, but not much.  They kind of cheated, by only painting his outer antenna silver, and leaving the inner one blue so it looks like it’s just part of his head.  However, when you look closely, you can see that it clearly looks like it is missing paint.  When you try to do too much with a head mold like this so it will look like two different molds depending how you paint it, you end up making both worse off for it.  They should have just used the same paint mask in different colors on both and gone with a single antennae instead of the double for Nova Prime, or molded it different and gone the other way.  It kind of reminds me how they painted the head on the 2011 club exclusive Sideburn.  On paper, it wasn’t a terrible idea, but in practice it falls flat.

Overall: This toy has three things going for it.  Number one, it does look pretty cool, even if it makes no sense.  Number Two, it’s an important Transformers character.  Number three, it’s free.  Really can’t go wrong there, and yes, you do pay $40 for membership, but it’s $100 saving on the Botcon set, so that’s already paid for itself before the toy.

Thanks for reading!