Halo Helmet 3-Packs 2009: Wave 2

Craftsmanship

- Detail is a good match with the 12” Master Chief

- Horizontal and vertical display options

- Three in one pack

Playability

- Unless you have a 12” Master Chief, there’s not much, unless you want to try your hand at bowling

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Halo Helmet 3-Packs 2009: Wave 2

by McFarlane Toys

To accompany the mid-80s run of the classic She-Ra animated series, one of the evil characters, Modulok – a red-blobby, crab-like creature – that came as a bag of parts. The “knob-and-socket” design wasn’t always easy to work with but thanks to some confusion at Christmas I had two of these guys to cobble together to make some truly hideous, nightmarish configurations. Those memories came back when I received a review set of Halo Helmet 3-Packs.

As far as pie-in-the-sky dreaming is concerned, McFarlane is kind of missing the boat on this. They should take a page out of Modulok’s playbook and ship bags of Master Chief parts. Being able to swap helmets on the 12” Master Chief is a cool

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feature, but one better would be a full collection of body parts in each package. I think it would be every Halo fan’s desire to put together a Spartan. So what if the legs were different from each other and the arms? The flaming red and cool blue might combine nicely with a pink torso; you never know.

Until that happens we have the heads. (And in

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McFarlane’s defence, it seems they might actually go this route with the 6” variety of figures; armor packs are coming in July 2009.)

Packed three to a cardback, the Halo Helmet packs are currently on their second wave and the sets include:

Set 1: Scout (white), Mark VI (blue), EVA (red)

Set 2: CQB, Rogue, EOD (all blue)

Set 3: Scout (red), Master Chief, EVA (brown)

Set 4: EOD (sage), Hayabusa (violet), CQB (yellow)

The detail for the head sculpts appear to be extremely accurate to the video game source material, though they could probably be more textured or possibly sport some kind of battle damage, like scorching or nicks to the plating or cracks on the visor.

Each head is packed with its own “named” base. I think McFarlane realized that having a head on a stick isn’t the ideal way to show off pieces like these, so they designed some different display possibilities right into the base. The first is that the stick the helmet sits on allows the head to be swivelled and pushed back into a position relative to the base that the helmet looks very much like a stuffed animal head when the base is hung on the wall. In each pack, there are plastic pegs that can be used to attach the bases together so it would be possible to attach all 12 heads in a string of vertical or horizontal tracks similar to a Brady Bunch scenario. (You can fight over which one would be Alice.)

I had to track down a 12” Master Chief to test out the ease of swapping heads. Guess what? It’s easy. There’s very little force required to swap heads.

I did find a bit of a flaw with the heads though. Surely, real Halo fans will have no problem identifying the heads – they’ll know a Scout from a Mark IV from a CQB – but for non-experts if you had a pile of Spartan heads, they’d be hard-pressed to match the head to the base. A simple fix would have been to include the name sculpted into the inside of the helmet. It’s minor, I know, but it saves going to the Internet – who keeps the cardbacks anymore? – to sort the helmets out.

McFarlane has done a really good job with such a focused property but there’s still room for improvement (i.e. battle damage would be awesome). And a bag of Spartan parts would good, too.

- Aaron Simmer

(June 5, 2009)