Here we have two characters in the form of Blue Booster and Wingtail in their altmodes. Blue Booster turns into the Speed Star, Sonic's race car, in the game Team Sonic Racing. As for Wingtail, he turns into the Tornado as it appeared in Frontiers. They generally match the designs used in their respective game, and the paint apps are decently plentiful to at least resemble the source material. Wingtail's propeller can rotate, though I wish this plane mode had rolling wheels to go with a slightly more expensive price tag. Speaking of wheels, Blue Booster's are snap-on rather than pinned, which can be where your mileage may vary regarding how well they roll. Generally speaking, they look pretty decent and are as close to the way they appeared in the Sonic Universe. Seeing the Tornado in the Collaboration line does make me appreciate it for how much it shows the intellectual side of Tails; by contrast, I always found Sonic driving a car to be a bit redundant. Also, is it me, or do the headlights and white bottom section look like eyes and teeth?
Wingtail can use the weapon for the robot mode as a booster if you look at it from underneath. It's the only form of weapon storage available in this set.
Their cockpits can open up to reveal nothing. No seats due to the transformations, and there aren't any minigigures to pilot them. Come to think of it, since when did either altmode have cockpits added onto them?
Transformation is fairly annoying for different reasons. Blue Booster transforms similarly to the Wheeljack sequence, with the front becoming the feet and the back becoming the arms. In fact, he has a swivel above the waist meant to rotate the assembly housing the head and arms before snapping the chest and back in place. The problem is that some of the hinges rely on friction to keep them in place instead of depending on tabs to secure them better. As for Wingtail, I just don't like how he works. Parts clash into each other, the figure feels cheap, the bottom portions of the wings come off too easily, and the back of the plane, which vaguely represents the tails associated with, well, Tails, kind of inhibits articulation. It is possible to position them away from the body, but with the way biplane Transformers work, it could have been done better. I mean, if ROTF Ransack can make up for the parts popping off with a more creative design, surely Wingtail can do something similar. The robot modes are decent stabs at being robotic versions of the two characters, though they have a couple of changes to keep them from being purely robotic versions of the characters. These include the lack of red on BB's feet (which would normally represent Sonic's shoes), while Wingtail has more red on him than Tails usually has. I guess that's to make up for the lack of a Knuckles in the set, since we normally see the trio probably more often than we do just Sonic and Tails. I also find it a bit funny how Wingtail is slightly taller than Blue Booster, considering how Sonic is the taller one. Not sure if that takes points away from this set but I just find that Blue Booster works decently while Wingtail suffers from how clunky his design looks. I also hate how hollow he ends up being. While Deluxe figures can mostly get away with it, I would expect a bit more from a Collaborative figure than I would a more standard offering from Studio Series or Age of the Primes.
Their head sculpts are Transformerized takes on the organic inspirations that brought us this collab. With how Sonic's design looks regarding the eyes, where they have the pupils in a single streak of white instead of two eyeballs, the visor design makes perfect sense for him. Meanwhile, Tails ends up being more of a robotic and stern version of his usual self. One weird thing about the colors is that Sonic has bronze to represent his bare skin on the muzzle in contrast to Tails, who has white for the fur on his face rather than silver. Not sure if it's a form of inconsistency or not, it's up to you.
The articulation is about the same for both figures, with ball jointed heads, shoulder rotation, outward arm movement, rotation at the biceps, waist rotation, universal hips, thigh rotation, hinged knees, and ankles that can pivot. Wingtail has double jointed elbows as well as hinges for the feet. Their accessories include the aforementioned cannon meant for Wingtail, while Blue Booster has the power up container which can spin for either the Autobot insignia or the invincibility sparkles. He also has a shield that can peg on the arms.
For a size comparison, here they are on each side of the SS86 Bonecrusher for a general Deluxe scale. They are slightly smaller than most Deluxes, which probably explains why they don't work as well as they should have for the Generations-esque engineering. Not that Bonecrusher is any better, but with him being a more standard Deluxe figure, I had higher expectations for the Collaborative line if they're going to either make new sculpts or very heavy retools. I don't have that many, but this is the worst one out of the lot that I own. Blue Booster is decent, if a bit rougher than figures like Earthrise Wheeljack and Legacy United Chase. Meanwhile, Wingtail feels more like those bootleg mashups you'd find at AliExpress, only official so he could be like a poorly engineered Transformer made by a company that isn't Hasbro, so it could be like those Marvel MegaMorphs made by ToyBiz or the Ranger-to-Zord toys Bandai America used to do. Screw it, even some Hasbro stuff was less refined in engineering like with a lot of Titanium and Star wars/Marvel crossovers. I got these with a price decrease, but even with that, I still can't recommend this set unless you're a huge Sonic fan. Spoiler alert, this set will be ranked as one of the worst non-Studio Series/AOTP purchases I made in this year.
Final ranking: ⭐⭐ and a half out of ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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