Trade Federation Droid Fighters - EI - Vehicles

Screaming through space in formation, invading Trade Federation droid fighters pose one of the greatest threats to the peaceful citizens of Naboo. Highly engineered to excel in a variety of combat situations, these heavily armed, automated space fighters maintain the ability to convert into walking droids with ground-combat capabilities. They became an integral element to the Trade Federation's massive and ruthless invasion of the planet Naboo.

Not all of the products in the Episode I vehicle assortment are great. And this opinion directly applies to the Trade Federation Droid Fighters three-pack. We honestly would like to know what Hasbro thought when they produced them. Not only did they design them in an odd way (all uniform in a flight pattern), only one has the potential to stand as seen in the opening scenes of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The other two are static pieces that can only sit atop a plug on the included display stand. It’s a very disappointing set, indeed. Even the gimmicky play feature is dumb. You can press the buttons on the handle and they either fire missiles of pop the vehicles off of the handle. Each button activates a different feature. It’s silly. Although Hasbro seemingly designed the Trade Federation Droid Fighters to match the onscreen characters, they’re terribly out of scale. This is only made worse by the beautiful paint operations wasted on them. But we’ll get to all of these points in a few.

The Trade Federation Droid Fighters set contains three Vulture Droids, but there are two sculpts included. The front leader comes with two wings that split in two to recreate its walking functionality. The other two following behind it are the same sculpt and comes with removable wings that DO NOT articulate. A glance won’t point out any noticeable differences between the two vehicles. But closer inspection will show you how completely different they are from each other. The biggest issue, of course, we have with the Trade Federation Droid Fighters are their scale. They are all much too small. They’re not even close to half the scale of the droids we see in The Phantom Menace. In our rough estimation, the Trade Federation Droid Fighters should be nearly as big as the Naboo Fighter., maybe a tad shorter in length. It is important to note that these “vehicles” are droids, but they function like vehicles when battling against their enemies. The small size of these droids also limits what Hasbro can do with the sculpt. And as you know, their articulation suffers.

It seems if it were a large sized “vehicle” that Hasbro would have worked in more articulation and perhaps an articulated neck (an essential and lacking feature in our opinion) to make these rather beautiful Separatist droids more screen-accurate and more exciting as a toy. Hasbro didn’t include enough features here, and we know that collectors will be disappointed with them. On average, the Trade Federation Droid Fighters come with two, perhaps three, areas of articulation. Both wings are removable but rotate in a swivel motion when plugged into holes on the side. The Vulture Droid with the split wings has more. These droids are quite boring when posed off of the included display stand too. While in a flying mode, the wings must be flush with the center of the droid, and that’s easily bumped and quickly out of alignment. Once again, we adore the beautiful paint job Hasbro gave these droids/vehicles, but they’re pretty terrible toys, and they likely won’t go over well with any Star Wars collector. We hope we’re wrong about that.