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Inferno Armor Iron Man

June 2, 2014 | By Errex More

I have always been fascinated by translucent figures. I remember I had a couple of Big Jim action figures that had either clear body parts or were made entirely from transparent plastic. Even in the 90’s, when McFarlane Toys released variant figures I always preferred the translucent version of a character to the regular colored ones. Therefore, when I realized that today’s review subject filled that criterion, I had to buy him.
The Inferno Armor Iron Man was released by Hasbro a few years ago in the Iron Man: The Armored Avenger line, which worked as a continuation to the regular Iron Man 2 movie line. As such, it is basically a recolor of the Iron Man Mark IV armor.

The interesting part is that this time around the entire figure was cast in translucent red plastic from head to toe. One thing I have noticed about translucent plastics is that the material always feels a little less flexible than opaque colored plastic, and over time they become brittle faster, although it is maybe too soon to be passing judgment about the durability of this figure.

I can say that the joints feel very tight overall, which in the case of the Mk. IV mold is actually an improvement, as the regular colored version tend to have a rather loose torso joint. As you’d expect, articulation is exactly the same as it was in previous releases of this mold, consisting of:

• Ball jointed neck.

• Pegged hinge shoulders.

• Pegged hinge elbows.

• Swivel wrists.

• Floating torso.

• Pegged hinge hips.

• Upper thigh swivels.

• Double hinge knees.

• Pegged hinge ankles.

What really make this an interesting release are two things, the accessories and the paint job.

On the paint application side of things, there is very little to talk about, as the bulk of the paint operations are limited to solid blocks of gold painted on limbs and torso, as well as the faceplate. The paint applications to the arms came out looking more coppery than gold, but I cannot say for sure if this is intentional or a factory oversight.
The neat thing about the paintjob is the area surrounding the ARC reactor, where they applied a very nice yellow gradient irradiating from the center of the chest.

On the accessories front, Inferno Armor Iron Man comes with an additional torso piece that goes over the head and which has a couple of panels that swivel up to show rows of vents of heat sinks.

The piece is made from translucent red plastic too and has some sort of canister sculpted at the back, sporting four round ports from which to connect some other accessories or hoses to them, even though none were included with this figure.

And to finish off the accessory count, Inferno Armor Iron Man also comes with a translucent red spring-loaded projectile launcher with two translucent yellow bolts to fire.

Even though I am not a big fan of the bulky accessories Hasbro gives to these figures, in this particular case I actually like the outline of the figure with the extra armor pieces, and even the launcher they selected this time is one of the more compact models, so it is really hard for me to decide how I want to display this Inferno Armor Iron Man.