Here is Cybershark in his beast mode. A hammerhead shark in this instance, it captures the anatomy and details quite well. The spotty pattern on the top is nicely made, and the fade to the exposed underside is decently done but not as seamless as the older version (I presume). In fact, the fade effect is not the same as it was for the original figure. His eye could be better painted, though. The jaw doesn't articulate but the fins can move around on ball joints.
There is partsforming involved in the transformation, as the tail comes off the hand and the head launches from the spring-loaded missile launcher. And now I just realized this side does the gradual fade better than the other side previously shown. But yes the partsforming is not something that will win everyone over, and I can see why with the tail and head both serving as crucial parts of the robot mode. The head can be left on the robot mode but it's not going to look that great.
Transformation is otherwise somewhat shellformery, with the sides of the shell serving as wing-like design traits that have red flesh coloring on the inside, likely as a distraction from the rest of the angles having the shellformer aspect to him. At the very least, what remains of the shark head can stay in robot mode as a normal design trait. Said robot mode looks alright for the Beast Wars line-up. It's hard to review figures like Cybershark without having any comparison to modern reinterpretations or a cartoon model as he was never in the show, with the closest being the crude commercial model from when he was with Inferno or his Japanese package art that emulates the CGI of the show. Without the hammerhead on the chest, his robot mode proportions are a little more normal.
Head sculpt is pretty ferocious for a Maximal, but that is part of the theme for the 90s when it came to them being more extreme. His mouth is painted white for the teeth with black diamonds added in the back to simulate the mouth's inside, though it kind of reminds me of the MMPR suits. Squint and the paint apps don't quite line up with the sculpting; that's something I'm not sure if the original version did better. And yeah, this guy did become the basis for Sky-Byte because his Transmetal toy literally became Sky-Byte. Anyways he has articulation for the head, shoulders, and hips on ball joints while his biceps and thighs are on swivels and his elbows and knees are on hinges. His hammerhead can be handheld as a weapon while a tail can be turned into a claw-like weapon.
The missiles can also be removed from the back and serve as a chest missile which makes him more like Warpath. Look closely and even they have shark details added to them.
As far as reuses are concerned, we have retools that deviate immensely from his original tooling. First, we got a Hellscream retool that looks like a kid stuck lego parts on an inflatable shark toy. Hellscream is basically BWII Starscream retooled as such during a revival gone wrong, or something along those lines. It's a batshit crazy deviation overall.
After that, we have Overbite, who is the G1 Pirhanacon using this mold. From here has fewer paint apps for the mechanical parts than with Hellscream and came in a two-pack with a Repugnus, who was a repaint of Fuzor Buzzclaw.
And finally, we get a more straightforward retool that now has him as a sawshark. his beast mode head, robot head, fins, and tail are retooled for this guy, and it just struck me that we never had a version of the mold that is a normal shark, though we do kind of get one for the Transmetal Cybershark figure, yet maybe save that for Sky-Byte.
Final ranking: ⭐⭐⭐ out of ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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