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Haven't managed to snag a Joe Trooper or CC yet, which is most unfortunate. But perhaps the weekend will net something.

Anyway, the last review of a Retaliation figure I own so far.

3) Zartan:
a) Packaging: Do I really have to say it folks?

b) The Figure: I'm going to be perfectly honest, this figure was one I initially planned on skipping. Then I decided that I didn't want to not take advantage of the half-off sale from last week to the best of my abilities, so I snagged this dude up.

At half price he's a really impressive looking figure in spite of his odd gimmic choice. He's also one of the most toned down almost 30th style Retaliation figures out there. In that he doesn't include any ridiculously over-the-top over large missile launcher or other strange accessory/gimmic.

I was mostly drawn to the sculpt on this figure, it is wickedly cool. Meant to convey Zartan in some sort of, I don't know, ninja battle suit or something (for when he's disguised as either of the two ninjas I suppose) the figure's sculpt and coloring looks pretty damn sweet. There is a lot of impressive detail, even with the nerfed articulation this almost looks like it could be a more realistic (IE non-Mohawked) iteration of Ninja Force Zartan. (Or some have claimed he looks like a hold over sculpt design from Renegades, personally I just don't see it.)

He has a decent number of accessories too and best of all, with exception to the spare heads for disguise purposes and the large crossbow weapon storage for all of them. Both blades can fit into the sheath that attaches to his back-pack and the small pistol he's sporting has a place to slide in on the back of his hood/chest armor piece. (Although it doesn't clip into anything due to the nature of the soft rubbery plastic used, still it mostly fits quite snuggly even when moving the figure around. Only when you cause the rubber holster to flex a bit will the gun fall out... Or, holding him upside down helps with it falling out too. But why would you ever display Zartan upside down?)

His articulation is the standard with Retaliation, he's got the single jointed knee, ball jointed hips, shoulders, elbows and head, swivel wrists and of course no ankles. The head articulation is slightly hindered while he's wearing the chest armor/hood combo, although his head will still turn inside of the hood it looks odd for him to be turning his head sideways to look at something without the hood moving. You can turn the hood with the head though, however this has the unfortunate side affect of knocking the scabbard/sheaths for the swords or the bolts for his crossbow backpack out of alignment. The hole in his rubber hood/chest armor piece is enough to keep the backpack of your choice from falling out completely, but it will pop out of the peg hole on his back. If it ever slid in there to begin with, I suspect the hood hole is for holding the backpack while he's not disguised and the peg hole is for holding the backpack when he is.

His hands are just a wee bit large due to the sculpt, so his weapons, while not snuggly fitting in, are noticably looser. I haven't had any issues with any of them falling out, except for the crossbow, but that thing is so big and top heavy as to be forgiven for constantly falling out of loosy-goose hands.

Now on to the gimmic, ordinarily Zartan includes alternate heads for making disguises, this is still the case here. The difference is, that with exception to the Snake-Eyes head, all of them include light-piping eyes. Apparently movie Zartan's eyes glow to distinguish when he's in disguise instead of suffering from some odd allergic reaction the sun turning his skin blue. Go figure.

Zartan's regular head includes a strip on the top (which the hood accomodates by having a slot on top) in green light piping plastic. The light piping effect is... typical of the gimmic, it looks decent enough, I just don't expect my human action figures to have glowing eyes. So it's kind of ho-hum for me, and really detracts a little from the heads, considering he won't be wearing his hood with the other light-pipe heads so you're stuck with a human figure in disguise with a noticeable strip of clear red plastic in the hairline/mask-line (for SS' head).

Each head represents a different disguise, we have the Snake-Eyes head, which looks pretty damn sweet on this body, and almost as if it were meant to fit in. Next for some odd reason Zartan is wearing this dark grey/black ensemble while disguised as Storm Shadow, the white masked head looks a little bit out of place on the darker body, it isn't a very convincing disguise, I would have preferred it if Hasbro included a soft good's white coat or cloak of some kind to cover up the dark body to better reflect the disguise, as opposed to the useless third head.

That's right, he's got a fourth head (third for disguises) and the packaging doesn't even call out who this is supposed to be. Is it Flint? The President? Storm Shadow without the Mask? (Highly Doubtful as it looks more like a military guy or something, not the Asian face of Storm Shadow) It's just there for the kiddies I guess, so Hasbro can say, heeeeeeeeeyyyyyyy kids disguise your Zartan figure with even more heads with light piping functions!

So Zartan comes with eleven accessories in total, aside from the Joe Trooper I believe that is the most accessories any one figure from wave one comes with. He's got four heads, the hood/chest armor soft rubber removable piece, the large crossbow, the extra bolts in backpack backpack, two swords, a back mounted scabbard set for both of them and a smallish pistol of possibly futuristic Cobra design. (Looks more like a laser pistol than a bullet toting one.)

Overall, I find myself really digging this figure when I thought I wouldn't honestly like it, due in part to the gimmic. The sculpt is fairly impressive, the storage capacity for the accessories that mean anything is great, and even the head swapping gimmic isn't too bad, though it loses a point for the horribly out of place light piping plastic on three of the four heads. Slap the SE head on this mold and it looks almost like it could be Snake-Eyes. So that's a bonus right there, and since the figure does not have any Cobra Symbols on him anywhere the disguise feature works out. It might have been neat though to see a tiny symbol painted onto the removeable chest armor piece, as I do like my Cobra operatives to be sporting their allegiances somewhere, but it isn't that necessary.

So ratings I'd have to go with... A solid four out of five for me. As always the packaging detracts half a point off from the figure and I'm just not too crazy about the light piping gimmic. Also, who the heck is the fourth head meant to be Hasbro? Just who?