Heavy Assault Stormtrooper - TVC - Basic (VC253)

One good thing about getting various characters that share the same tooling is that you can army build rapidly with little fanfare. Let us bring your attention to the ridiculous The Vintage Collection Stormtrooper Walmart exclusive figure. How Hasbro ever decided to make this action figure a Walmart exclusive is beyond all collectors’ understanding. It should be a two or three per case figure in the standard case assortments, and we should be able to buy them by the cases at more prominent distributors like Entertainment Earth as needed. But no, many collectors couldn’t get the Walmart-exclusive Stormtrooper added to their carts. While we expect it to return to an orderable status in the future, acquiring the most popular action figures shouldn’t be so challenging. Hasbro also needs to learn which figures should be exclusive and what others need to be general marketplace items. That’s a roundabout way of saying that the Gaming Greats Heavy Assault Stormtrooper figure is a “backdoor” way of army-building Imperial Stormtrooper action figures from A New Hope. The Heavy Assault Stormtrooper is the Walmart exclusive figure with accessories. This realization is good news for those who like quantities of their action figures.

Thankfully, Hasbro didn’t add battle damage or washes to the bright-white armor. And if you remove the pauldron and take an E-11 blaster from one of your other Stormtrooper action figures, you’ll have the “STAR WARS” Stormtrooper, exclusive to Walmart, in your collection too. And we’ll be able to easily order multitudes of them since the Gaming Greats Heavy Assault Stormtrooper is more widely available. There is a lot of good news surrounding the Heavy Assault Stormtrooper. Although based on 2019’s TVC Imperial Stormtrooper (VC140) action figure from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Hasbro updated the lower legs and feet. They narrowed the armor so it didn’t droop over the shoe. They also added new feet that now include “rocker” ankles for optimal posing. It’s excellent to get a sneak peek at the Walmart-exclusive TVC Stormtrooper with this release, and it’s also comforting to know that if quantities of the Walmart exclusive don’t meet the community’s demands, we have an alternate route to take to army build them. The Stormtroopers multipack was suitable, but those have outdated legs. Hopefully, Hasbro will offer updated Stormtrooper sets with upgraded legs. That would make things right in the world, wouldn't they?

The Heavy Assault Stormtrooper comes with some interesting and engaging accessories. Hasbro included one of the guns the character uses in the Jedi Fallen Order video game, a heavy cannon, and the front of the gun is removable to help with the energy effect, but it doesn’t work well on our sample. We had better luck not removing the front piece of the cannon. They also included a corporal’s black pauldron, even though there are different rankings in the video game. Last, Hasbro also included a blast effect with an energy shield. The larger light blue disc attaches to the end of the blaster cannon, and then the blast effect has a plug that connects to the barrel of the weapon. These accessories create balancing issues for the figure, but with proper posing, they look incredible because they accent the figure. Shipping alongside the Heavy Assault Stormtrooper is the Stormtrooper Commander (VC254) figure. It too shares the same recipe, but because of the blue color flashes, it cannot substitute for Original Trilogy Imperial Stormtroopers. The point here is that it’s terrific to see Hasbro use the latest updated sculpts to make their quality action figures. The Heavy Assault Stormtrooper and the Stormtrooper Commander technically serve as “repaints” to the Walmart exclusive Stormtrooper (VC231) figure as their numbers follow after this. But, they arrived months beforehand and are more like “pre-paints” of the Walmart release.