Night Fox

It seems like these days, any driver or pilot that comes with a vehicle is an after thought. An easy place to cost cut, articulation and accessories for these figures may soon be a thing of the past. However, that wasn’t the case all that long ago. Case in point, Night Fox, the driver that came packed in the Pursuit of Cobra version of the AWE Striker.

Appearance:

Night Fox looks like he’s dressed to go into battle in Afghanistan. Black shirt with khaki pants, he just looks like a Special Forces dude.

Further enhancing that look is head. He’s wearing a ski mask similar to Beachhead. But to change up that look a bit he has a scarf or shemagh around the bottom portion of this head and face. It’s done as an extra piece around his neck and has some texture to it. Surprisingly, it really doesn’t limit the head articulation that much.

What it does limit, is the way his web gear fits. Above the scarf and it’s riding up way too high, below and it scarf doesn’t fit right. The vest has some wash on it to bring out the detail on the pouches sculpted on the front. The back looks like it’s padded. I would assume this is to make driving more comfortable.

The body of the figure is a reuse of parts we’ve seen before. The legs are the Rise of Cobra ones where one is a tad bit longer than the other making him stand funny. In general though, this a pretty decent generic uniform body.

Fox has fingerless gloves on. They look good enough. However, combined with these arms, they give him the appearance of wearing a shirt that has arms that are slightly too long. It’s not a terrible thing, and if anything, gives him some character.

The one thing that really bugs me is the holster. The way he’s packed has bent it and it doesn’t want to sit flat on this leg. The belt is a simple band with a walkie talkie sculpted on it. When he’s sitting in the driver seat about the only place it seems to want to settle is between his legs. A holster mounted in the hole on his leg would have made much more sense.

Fun:

Just like articulation, you don’t see much in the way of accessories with modern vehicle drivers. However, Night Fox is overloaded.

He come with some choices in head gear to start with. The first is a helmet with flip down night vision goggles. It looks good, but one small problem. It’s too small. It will sort of go on his head, but you can tell it’s not right. The hat that comes with him has the same problem. Now I can see wearing the helmet over the ski mask, but a hat and scarf?

It doesn’t stop there though. He comes with a bunch of weapons. Two of which are small tan pistols. They are actually a pair of the same pistol, which is kind of nice. The trigger looks a little thick at this scale, but not too bad. Of course, he only has a holster for one of them so you have a spare.  He also has a shot gun molded in the same tan. The proportions of it look off to me. The stock seems too short and the barrel too long.

Finally, he come with a large caliber machine gun. This is a tripod mounted belt fed beauty. To keep it fed, Night fox comes with an ammo container back pack and belt of bullets. Nice setup as the belt can fit into the gun and the ammo box. The only thing that would make it better is a place to store it on the vehicle.

Overall:

As a single carded figure, I don’t know how well Night Fox would have sold. However, as a pack in, he’s pretty darn sweet. There’s enough gear here that if you had multiple AWE Strikers you could change his looks a couple different ways to look like a much larger array of drivers. The fact he comes with so many weapons puts points in the plus column.

Not a fantastic figure, but not a horrid one either. A pretty good generic looking driver done right.

Engineernerd Score: 87/100

Tags: AWE Striker, Driver, GI Joe, Hasbro, Night Fox

Category: Featured, GI Joe, Toy Reviews