Phil's Vortex,
Operation Combination Target Hawk,
Generation 2 Vortex,
Car Robots Hepter
and
Robots in Disguise, Wal-Mart & Wal-Mart Universe Ro-Tor Review

Vortex

Vortex is a grey helicopter with black rotor blades and green for the robot upper legs, head and add on weapons. The underside of the helicopter - robot chest - is purple. He has a large four bladed rotor mounted horizontally behind the cab and a small four bladed rotor mounted vertically on his tail. Both spin freely. There's a gun under the cab and two large cannons mounted on round pegs on the tail.

Like all the combiner limbs Vortex can be either used as an arm or a leg for any of the combiner bodies - see the Bruticus review for how to transform him for that purpose. However he can also combine with Metroplex: To attach to his leg just flip out the peg on the underside of the toy. For his arm you additionally need to remove the chin gun, rotate the section holding the larger rotor back & fold down the cab at the front. When attached to the shoulder the hole Vortex can take Metroplex's fist but it's important to note that the extra attached limb will not move independently of Metroplex's own arm !

TF: Remove the chin gun. Rotate the section holding the larger rotor back & fold down the cab at the front. Split the tail in half and fold down to the sides turning the halves round so the inside of the tail is against the outside of the body.

Vortex's only real articulation in this mode are his shoulders which move. He has no hands but the tail cannons can be attached to the side of the arms as weapons.

Overall: more limited than Brawl but an adequate design for the size and price point.

In the west Vortex was available by himself only - there's no G1 Bruticus giftset issued by Hasbro. However GIGI in Italy did issue one, as did Takara in Japan where Vortex was numbered toy D-66 or in the Bruticus giftset numbered D-69.

Vortex was re-released in the UK & Europe in the gold Transformers Classics packaging in the early 1990s. Operation Combination Target Hawk

Operation Combination Target Hawk

Target Hawk swaps the grey for green, purple for darker green and the green on the head and weapons for grey.

Nice looking more army coloured helicopter, robot's not bad either

Target Hawk was only available in the Battle Gaea giftset ( see here for pictures ) labelled TF-10 - not all numbers were used in this brief transformer series.

Target Hawk is another of those "Don't even bother trying to look for" toys - Battle Gaea doesn't come up too often.

Generation 2 Vortex

Vortex swaps the grey for a pale blue with purple camouflage and uses dark purple for all the previous purple and green pieces. Compared to some G2 repaint Vortex is perfectly sensible - a sea colour schemed helicopter.

G2 Vortex was only available by himself - there's no G2 Bruticus giftset.

Car Robots Hepter

Hepter swaps the grey for dark metallic blue with some white painted round the bottom, the purple for orange and green for red. It's almost a sea rescue colour scheme with the orange on the chest representing a life jacket. There's an upside down G2 Autobot symbol on the tail - see the Black Convoy review for why these keep occurring in RID.

Hepter is Car Robots toy D-009 and is also available in the Baldigus giftset D-011.

Robots in Disguise Ro-tor

Ro-Tor simplifies Hepter's colour scheme by making the blue cast a darker more plasticy blue and loosing the white paint. The symbol on the tail becomes a proper Decepticon one.

Hepter looks the better of the two versions.

The basic case containing Ro-tor was not available at the same time as Mega-Octane which led to the limbs being big shelf warmers for a long while in the UK.

Ro-tor was only available on a basic card - there is no Robots In Disguise Ruination giftset.

Universe Ro-tor

Ro-Tor gains a darker grey on grey camouflage pattern for this release - described widely as Artic Camouflage it's probably more appropriately termed Urban Camouflage. Robot chest, head and weapons are all black.

Of all the Combaticons Vortex suits this colour scheme the beast and it aids the combined form by giving it a unified colour scheme.

Ro-Tow was available solely in the Ruination giftset only available at Wal-Mart

Walmart Universe Ro-Tor

Ro-tor this time comes in a Desert camouflage scheme - a sandy colour on which is a pattern in two shades of brown. The chest is orange and the head & weapons are red as per the normal rid release.

Again the colour scheme suits Ro-tor better than the two Combaticons I've reviewed so far.

Ro-tor was available solely in the Universe Ruination giftset only available at Wal-Mart.

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