Phil's
Micromaster Airwave
Review
Airwave is the Micromaster Air Port Base. The Airport itself consists of a blue hanger building with a door that lifts inside the building allowing the Airwave Micromaster - a red repaint of Nightflight from the Air Strike Team - to be parked inside. Mounted on the left of the building is an orange plastic control tower. The most interesting part of this mode is his runway and ramp connectors. It deviates from the norm established by the other 3 bases - it doesn't have one ramp connector facing front on the right with another on the side to the left. Airwave's base has a connector at either end of a runway that runs in front of the hanger building and has a length about twice the width of the main part of the battle station. This is a good thing - it enables the base to act as a trough road between other bases. The two halves of the runway are mounted on pivots and one or both can be turned so they face forward (or any direction in between). But when the Runway is moved two more ramp connectors are revealed underneath them on either side of the battle station - I never spotted these till I looked at the instructions online in preparation for writing this review ! This means it's a great toy for connecting to other Micromaster bases or battlestations.
An alternate configuration for this toy is to fold down the control tower and fold back the hanger building 90 degrees, giving a larger area to the base and a larger open front hanger. Alternately fold the hanger all the way back - as per the official TF bellow - to form a pit/jail cell.
TF: Fold the control tower down and fold the hanger back 180 degrees. Swing the runway halves round so both face forward. Fold the runway haves up as far as you can revealing the missiles.
The Airwave Missile Base mode is a bit of a let down. The missiles just sit there - this toy was made during the non firing missiles stage of Transformers.
The missile control centre where the Micromaster sits is a bit something of nothing and there's no way to connect this mode to other bases and battlestations.
Airport mode is great though !
Airwave was released in Japan as C-345 where he was a Cybertron (Autobot) called Overair. The base - minus the Micromaster but with the addition of some PVC figures - was re-released in Japan as part of the Brave Police line.
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