Electrostaff Purge Trooper - TVC - Basic (VC195)

As often as we’d love to give Hasbro the benefit of the doubt when it comes to new releases in The Vintage Collection line, it’s hard to step up to bat for them when they take the laziest routes possible for the action figures they design. The Electrostaff Purge Trooper, perhaps the “newest” of all The Vintage Collection Gaming Greats 3.74-inch action figures, fails to meet our expectations. It’s not because it’s a bad action figure. It isn’t. But we’ve seen this tooling way too many times before this, and if you’re not going all out with more popular clone trooper characters, characters like the Electrostaff Purge Trooper fail to engage us. Again, it’s not because it’s a terrible action figure. It’s because it is the same old thing repeatedly, with no regard for new tooling, especially when Hasbro can add new tooling into the line and implement it into the figures. hey revised the arms, but there isn't much else to note here. An Entertainment Earth exclusive, you won’t be able to find the Electrostaff Purge Trooper at your local Fan Channel outlet. And you’ll have to pay a couple of dollars more than the other three Gaming Greats action figures because, well, that’s the way things roll sometimes.

The Electrostaff Purge Trooper is a rework of 2011’s/2020’s TVC Clone Trooper (VC45) figure. This time, Hasbro cast the figure in shiny black plastic and painted some details in white and red on the armored plates. The figure’s joints move like butter, which is fantastic since the tooling is so old at this point. The figure has some posing issues, but overall, you’ll find that it contains a tremendous array of poses to help you out with its display in your collection. Hasbro tooled an all-new head sculpt, which is nothing more than an Airborne Trooper’s helmet. But unlike 2007’s TAC Airborne Trooper (30 07) figure, there is no removable helmet with this release, so the proportions are much cleaner than the figure released in 2007. It also comes with a soft-good kama and a belt with straps that hang down loosely and don’t reconnect with the mold at any point. Hasbro included a complex electrostaff accessory. It breaks down into five parts. You get the left/right or top/bottom portions with the center staff and then two purple electro effects to show that the weapon is on and ready to deflect and threats.

Admittedly, the Electrostaff Purge Trooper looks excellent, especially when posed in some action stances. But the figure is almost exhaustingly dull. We find it harder and harder to get excited over new action figures that borrow so much old tooling. These actions would have been welcomed a half-decade ago, but now we’re so far removed from the original debut of The Vintage Collection line that reusing the old parts a decade later feels disingenuous and lazy at best, even if they slightly tweaks parts like forearms or something similar. Thankfully, the Electrostaff Purge Trooper might escape criticisms like this because the figure comes with 27 points of articulation and mostly comes with premium ball-jointed articulation. But that assertion might not hold water for that much longer either because it’s now standard for TVC figures to come with swivel thigh articulation. Despite our reluctance to get excited for the Electrostaff Purge Trooper, we hope Hasbro continues producing figures for the Gaming Greats sub-line. The card art is above average, and there are some fantastic troopers in this subset of the Star Wars universe.