Shadow Commander knock-off review

First a little primer: Ultra Magnus was actually a repaint of "Powered Convoy" before Hasbro introduced him to Transformers as an all-new character. Conveniently, the white repainted Optimus Prime toy hidden inside the armour was ignored until Dreamwave comics introduced the concept that Magnus was in fact physically identical to Prime underneath the armour. From that point on, Hasbro and Takara started producing white variants of almost every Prime toy and called it Magnus.

And they did so with the popular "Classics" line a couple of years ago selling an exclusive 2-pack of "Ultra Magnus" (a white Prime) and a "Sky Warp" (a black Starscream) through Target stores in the USA... but fans had gotten wise... Enter an outfit calling themselves Fansproject.

Fansproject have released an unlicensed trailer kit to complement the white Prime toy making it truly fully Ultra Magnus in his fully armoured Generation 1 appearance. And they didn't stop there. When Hasbro released a black repaint exclusive to SDCC calling him "Nemesis Prime," Fansproject started releasing repaints too.

Since then, the Fansproject kits have sky-rocketed in price on the secondary market. It was only a matter of time before this happened...But did I pay a premium on the secondary market for a rare variant? No! This is a Chinese knock-off. Yes, even the unlicensed and unauthorized products are getting ripped off now!

How is it? Well aside from being a fraction of the cost of an original Fansproject kit, you kind of get what you pay for. At first glance it looks good. Even the packaging and instruction booklet was KO-ed. The KO includes everything you would find in the original (I've heard previous KO iterations were missing the waist piece or other optional bits like the alternate face-plate or missing clip for the sword which normally stores itself under the trailer). All in all, a pleasant surprise how accurate the copy has become.

Now for the bad news.
Check out the smeared glue over the surface! Thankfully, the nature of the trailer is that it's lots of pieces together. So each piece had a separate level of quality and that was the worst of the mess.
On the other side there's what I call over-trim. The white stress mark is the result of someone breaking off the flash after this part left the mold. Amateur work. But again... it's a KO and this is what cheap gets you.
Finally I wanted to show the shoulder part. One side is great - almost indistinguishable from the real thing. The other... not so much. There are glue smudges and gaps where the seams should have met (too much glue adding thickness). On the other hand, I would point out that the clips are copied accurately so the shoulder armour does indeed connect with the molded details on the original figure's shoulders.

In fact, the only part that is "non-functional" is the right hand (it won't snap into place). So holding the big gun is out of the question. Since it's a hand though posing it in certain positions will allow it to rest in place (as seen in the full-body picture above).

Overall, I guess I'm willing to let the defects slide because I was expecting much worse. But the KO does come complete as the real thing. And although the booklet pages were stapled in the wrong order, and the box has that pale bootleg printing like they have on pirate CDs, well... like I said, you get what you pay for. It's crap but at least it isn't completely worthless.