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Stormtrooper (Black Series, 1/18 scale)

October 3, 2015 | By Errex More

Even if you only bought one of each figure released in the Hasbro Star Wars lines, chances are you already have a pretty sizeable number of plain Stormtroopers in your collection.

And still, when Hasbro announced that they would add yet another of these troopers to the first few waves of the 1/18 scale Star Wars Black Series, I could not imagine what could they do to made it interesting enough to add to my collection.

In a sort of weird parallelism to the 6-inch line, the more recent 3.75-inch Stormtrooper mold was actually used originally to previously produce the Sandtrooper figure included with the Wal-Mart Exclusive Dewback, as attested by the slot in his back used to attach the bulky backpack in that other figure.

I do have some issue with this because the helmet mold seems a little off to me, a little lacking in definition and slightly scrunched up. Also, these molds are already starting to show some decay, as evidenced by the increasingly marked mold lines.

On a more positive note, the Stormtrooper has really good articulation consisting of:

• Ball jointed neck.

• Pin & disk shoulders.

• Pin & disk elbows.

• Swivel wrists.

• Floating torso.

• Pin & disk hips.

• Pin & disk knees.

• Pin & disk ankles.

The boxes hanging from the rubber belt piece tend to get in the way of the hip articulation, but the belt is made from a pliable enough material and can be rotated out of the way for deep, dynamic poses.

Even though the Stromtrooper color scheme is as simple as it can be, the paint application is precisely what lets this figure down.

While it is true that the black undersuit is far from being perfectly painted, the key issues with these figures are with the helmet paint apps. On my figure, the eye lenses were not entirely painted to fill the sculpted edge, and the “mouth” grille that in previous versions used to be gray with black lines, is now entirely black, making it look unfinished. And a lot of the figures I saw at stores had the black line over the brow either badly painted or in some cases, touching the lenses.

Granted, fixing these paint issues is not really that hard to do but so far, there is very little to justify grabbing this guy at stores, Right? Well the one saving grace, the element that makes this figure interesting enough to get lies in one of the accessories included.

This Stormtrooper comes armed with a long blaster rifle, molded in black and unpainted, as well as a new E-11 blaster carbine. This carbine has the particularity of being actually composed of three separate pieces that provide it with a functional, collapsible stock.

The weapon does end up being noticeably bulkier than the regular E-11 molds used so far, and thus will not work with the regular carbine holsters found on previously released Stormtroopers but it is a nice looking piece, although I let it for you to decide if it is reason enough to purchase this figure.