This was the first time that Optimus Primal had been done as a deluxe sized toy. The toy is mainly molded in black & clear blue plastic with some gold paint on the shoulders, chest, back and face. Each arm turns at the shoulder and bends a little out to the side at the same point. Mounted in his left shoulder is a green bladed throwing weapon. There's a rotational bicep joint where the arm becomes blue, a bending elbow, a joint for the thumb and joints for first & second knuckle on the remaining four fingers which are molded together. His waist turns as do both of his hips, but only the left hip folds to the sides. Knee and ankle are ball joints ending in a pair of hand like feet that make it difficult to stand him up straight.
He has an action feature in this mode. If you pull down the flap behind the head and push it in it causes his mouth to open, his shoulders to swing back, his mouth to open and his chest to open up revealing a green BM Maximal spark - I'm presuming you're meant to pose the arms right before doing this to get some sort of chest beating action out of him.
TF: Open the back flap, fold the head back into it, close the flap up. Pull the shoulders and their connecting struts away from the side of the toy. Fold above the neck and link the shoulders together to form the robot's waist and legs. Twist the legs till the feet face forward, fold the thumb back as a heel spur and fold the fingers of the beast under the foot. Separate the beast waist in two and fold to the sides. Pull back on the blue part of the beast's chest, then fold the lower part into the top part. Fold the beast's bottom against the robot's back. Fold the beast waist halves onto the sides of the robot body and peg in place. Swing the elbows round.
What you get out of the end is a quite attractive blue and black robot with the gold paint mainly on the chest and the hips. The weapon has ended up in his left hip and can be inserted into his right hand. The right arm can then be pulled up & back and will spring forward on release causing the weapon to be thrown. Except it doesn't because no toy throwing gimmick has ever worked ! The grip on the hand is either so loose it drops the weapon or so tight that it doesn't let go of it when it should ! The gimmick explains the limitation to the hip I mentioned earlier. Beast leg articulation can now be attributed to the robot's arms and similarly beast arms to the robot legs. The spark isn't visible in this mode and if it was it would be upside down. Sadly the beast back flap can still be opened in this mode which means the beast head can be folded down into an unfortunate position.....
One of the consequences of the TF is that he's ended up with rather a large lump of clear blue plastic - the beast lower chest - folded up on his back which doesn't look too good. I'd have got round this by implementing the TF very differently. I'd have had both the shoulder and the hip on each side connected to a bar running down the side of the toy - similar to what TM Rhinox has for moving his beast front legs to become the robot legs. You'd pull the waist apart like you do at the moment, pull the bar out to the sides, turn it through 180 degrees and fold what were the shoulders down to become the new waist. The heads would then fold in and out of the body. You'd probably loose the chest beating gimmick but it wouldn't be a huge loss.
And then we have the head which I will now describe: A clear blue plastic cover over a green brain which light pipes through to the eyes (working light pipe = plus points !) A gold bar running under the eyes and over the nose and a molded mouth. Here's my problem: It looks nothing like Prime/Primal. I can cope with Optimus taking different forms but where possible I do want his head to be identifiable. The same problem carries over to most of the BM toys which are characters brought over from BW - their heads in no way resemble the previous version of the character. It's more obvious with Prime. I have my suspicions that this toy wasn't originally meant to be Prime at all in fact ....
Overall: OK ape, OK robot apart from the back pack kibble and the failed gimmick. But it isn't Optimus Primal, it doesn't look like any previous version of him and it doesn't look like what you see on screen in the BM cartoon and that hurts the toy more than anything and in turn does real damage to the line.