Thoughts on the NECA Heavy Weapons Guy

 This is the NECA Heavy Weapons Guy, and I'd like to talk about him.

He's almost majestic, then you notice he can't look where he's aiming.

 

    
    I'm not beating around the bush with this one, this figure stinks. I'm talkin' about garlic and sauerkraut halitosis, I'm talkin' about a whole bag of burnt popcorn, I'm talkin' about water treatment plant runoff pipe stank. 

    Of all the proper money-cost figures that I have, Heavy here is the worst.

    A bit of background before going in too far, this Heavy Weapons Guy figure was released in 2013 in NECA's (National Entertainment Collectables Association) second series of Team Fortress 2 action figures, alongside the Soldier and after the Pyro and the Demoman in the first figure series.
NECA apparently makes figures of... any property they can license, it looks like, just scrolling through their figures there's comics, cartoons, horror movies, video games, the list keeps going. I won't speak to the quality of any of their other figures in any of their other lines, but the Team Fortress 2 figures all pretty uniformly stink. 

We'll talk about them more later, let's get on with Heavy.

Not much of a flex. His elbow doesn't bend much further.

Now certainly his size is appropriate and imposing, he's taller than the rest of my figures, but that presents a problem. See, when something is designed to be top-heavy and you've got to translate that into a workable toy, the sound logic is to make the upper portion of the figure hollow, so as to alleviate the workload of the tiny legs, right?

WRONG, as far as NECA was concerned. Heavy's entire hulking upper body seems to be, given his ridiculous weight, a solid lump of plastic. Why would anyone do this? It can't be cost-effective, making a seven inch tall figure's largest portion be completely solid, but they did it.
If he falls over, and he does, he comes down with a thunderous thud on the table. I haven't got a scale handy but I'd reckon he weighs at least a pound, that's unreasonable.

Heavy wonders why he was made this way.

I definitely can't fault him for not being the right proportions, overall his shape is very accurate and most of the details are correct, but this is basic stuff, this is "why would I buy this if it was wrong" territory. As a figure he's complete junk. 

It's easier to assess when you've got your hands on him, obviously, but his joints are incredibly stiff, except for the ones that are too loose. Moving his arm around is an awful experience, the way the joints kind of click into positions rather than being completely free, and his ridiculous character-accurate bulk means he can't do much with them, crossing his arms is impossible, getting his hands to his face is impossible, this guy can't even scratch his butt comfortably thanks to his limited range of movement.

Heavy comes to a realization, but won't say what.

His giant torso actually does feature a joint, hidden underneath his vest, so he can pivot at the waist. The problem is that the surrounding vest is rigid plastic, so it doesn't allow for any sort of dynamic posing, he can't bend over, he can hardly bend back, and he seems to always be canted to one side for some reason, he's very hard to straighten up.

He boasts more than twenty-five points of articulation, according to NECA, just like the rest of the TF2 range, but it's a lot like saying you've got a warehouse full of broken-down cars. Yes, you have them, but none of them work. 

Of particular note are Heavy's legs, deliberately scrawny things that they didn't translate over to a physical figure well at all.

He ain't gonna look like this too often.

    Again the proportions are accurate, the sculpting is even pretty good, capturing the rumpledy look of his pants and the mismatch between them and his skinny boots. It's in the joints that these legs absolutely eat pant, the hip joints seem to be some kind of awkward ball rather than a proper hip, and the molding flares up to maintain the general pant shape but severely limits movement. The knees are acceptable but are hindered by the hips, and the ankles?

More like this.

Ough. Somebody gotta get Heavy some vitamin supplements because his ankles are easily his weakest points, at least the ones on mine are. It's hard to get his feet level on them, and the left one has a tendency to buckle under his weight. The place where you want the most rigid joints on such a big figure and you get the most delicate ones. Mind you, he didn't actually come with that stand I've had him pictured on, I had to buy that in a pack of stands from, wouldn't-you-know-it, NECA.
But guess what? The peg was too long. I had to sand it down for his foot to fit over it properly. 
And look at the holes real quick, do you see? The hole on his right heel is too small to fit over a peg, not without some serious fighting.

Ridiculous.

Heavy is stumped.

    Heavy does come with an accessory besides his beloved minigun, Sasha, though it takes some doing for him to use it. 

Like all the TF2 figures, and I'll assume most of NECA's other lines, he features replaceable hands, and getting them on and off is absolutely no fun. I appreciate the strong connection, sure, but you really gotta yank these suckers to get 'em off the pegs. 

But when you've done that, replacing his minigun-wielding mitts, he gets to wave around his shotgun.

Fat guy with a little gun.

 I loves me the TF2 shotgun, the way it looks, the way it works in-game, the fact that most of my favorite classes get to use it, it's all good stuff, very good stuff.

This likeness here is actually very good and Heavy doesn't look half bad just holding it, but that's really all he can do. 

Hold it.

Those movement limitations come right back as soon as you try to pose him aiming at anything, his in-game pose while using it has him hunched over, handling it pretty daintily and this figure can't even get close to that position.

No Fat Scout fun for this figure.

I stink, therefore I am.

The alternate hands look decent enough even without the gun, the left hand could probably hold an object of similar size to the foregrip, and the right hand could be a pointing finger of some sort. 

But it comes right back to his range of movement being crap, you can't hardly do anything with his arms so any potential holding and pointing is essentially moot.

At least he can get a little philosophical, should the need arise.

Heavy feels nothing.

But all that pushed aside, the bad joints and the weak legs and the giant plastic lump of a body, the realest, truest problem with Heavy here is the likeness. 

Does this guy even look like Heavy?

Superficially, yes, of course he does, he's obviously that guy with the big gun and the big hands and the tiny legs and head, but there's something off. 

If you clicked on that TF2 Wiki link earlier, you might have noticed a pattern. Despite his rough childhood and his PhD in Russian literature, Heavy is the picture of joviality, he has fun doing his job of mowing down the other team, of sweeping his minigun across the battlefield and watching people get reduced to red mulch. Sure he looks serious in a couple pictures, but in the game he's always singing, laughing, complimenting his teammates, he's a big irrepressible ball of fun a good 70% of the time.
Giving the face of TF2, the guy who's smiling in nearly every promo image for the game and even the official Steam avatars, such a flat expression is criminal. 

But even more than that, he just don't really look like the Heavy. His cheekbones are too pronounced, his jaw is too angular, his forehead is too short and his complexion is too sallow. Of particular note is the decision to paint his stubble on in grey rather than brown, that combined with his more angular face makes him look a good twenty years older than he ought to be.

Of course. this not-really-looking-like-the-guy-they're-supposed-to-be issue extends to the entire range. Let's take a look, together, like a family. I apologize for some of the images being low-quality, they were the best I could find.

The Pyro looks mostly like the Pyro. 

He's got a little bit of a pinhead going on, more than the character normally does, but it'd be very hard to mess up the one character specifically wearing a gas mask.

The Demoman does not look so much like the Demoman. 

He's having a good time, like any good Demoman should, but his proportions are messy, very messy. His face is much too short, his nose is too wide even if he's smiling, and his face is overall less angular than it should be. And it's not clear from this image but they opted to make his soul patch a little bump of plastic, which is just awful.

The Soldier does not look like he's about to enjoy the horrors of war, this man looks shell-shocked. 

A thousand-yard stare hides under that helmet, and I'm willing to bet a lot of his trauma is related to how they didn't paint his service medal ribbon the right color are you kidding me.

It's got a grey ribbon, even on the BLU version it's got a grey ribbon. 

I don't know how you mess that up.

For the rest of his face, it's just okay, his jaw is too narrow and he should either be having more fun or be more angry, this flat expression doesn't work.

The Engineer is reasonably Engineer-ish, though his stubble color is off and the strip from his lip to his chin is much too narrow.

Just like the Heavy, this good ol' boy should be smilin', but then again he's got valid reason to be upset.

They gave the BLU Engineer a RED toolbox.

This is an official promotional image straight from NECA's site, they didn't see anything wrong with this? 

Nobody stopped and went, "Hey, wait" about this, nobody.

But these were the same people that were fine with this Spy.

The Spy looks so very, very special. 

It's a work of art, is what it is, that face. You couldn't get more wrong if you tried, he looks like an old G.I. Joe figure in terms of shaping and paint quality, and that's being very mean to old G.I. Joes, and this is the promo image, it gets worse than this.

Do you a quick image search for "TF2 Spy figure" and you'll get wonderful things like this.

Five o' clock shadow, nothin', this man has been eating mud. 

The bleed-over from his balaclava paint to his mouth is present on every picture of him I've seen, it's just incredible. You have to assume these things are all hand-painted, but by people who weren't given a reference photo, just a general idea.

The Scout looks kind of like he should, though his earpiece is missing its microphone, but mostly he looks...

He looks like a thing pretending to be the Scout, the soulless black eyes and the misshapen smile lend him an uncanny quality.

Not like a horrible beast that's wearing Scout's skin as a suit or anything, but an imitator trying to blend in, a distorted mirror to the real thing.

But no microphone, really? 

The Medic might actually be worse than Spy. 

Good god. The big fat glasses, the lumpy face, the huge red nose, this is more like a crappy rubber halloween mask. 

The actual Medic is a reasonably handsome man, whatever's going on here is an absolute travesty.

But we're almost done, just hold out a little longer.

The Sniper looks like Keanu Reeves.

It's not just me, right? He totally looks like him, just a little exaggerated. 

The issue here is exacerbated by him not coming with his sunglasses. He just doesn't have them, at all, he comes with his sniper rifle (which he can't hold and look into the sight of because of course he can't) and that's it. No SMG, no kukri, no sunglasses. 

The final offering in the entire range (as far as I know the BLU variants of this final wave never materialized) and it's easily the weakest. Both of the other mercs in this fourth and final batch come with all their weapons, Sniper comes with one.

And no sunglasses.

And that's the NECA Heavy Weapons Guy, along with some notes on the rest of the TF2 crew. 

I apologize if I at any point made this figure look kind of cool, because from a distance, from a still, he does look kind of cool, it's why I bought him, it's even why I keep him on my shelf to gather dust. 

But don't get any wrong ideas, he and the rest of the TF2 figures are pretty bad, bad joints, bad face sculpts, bad paintjobs, bad range of movement, even bad accessories, it's all here, and they cost about twenty-five bucks each. If you really, really committed yourself to buying all of them in both colors... you couldn't, because after the gap between waves three and four that lasted four years, they never even released Scout, Medic and Sniper in BLU. That was in 2018 and there's been absolutely no word on them since, the figures are all discontinued, the line ended with a whimper and I'm glad I never bought any of them other than the Heavy. 

With TF2 being basically on life-support as of this writing, infested with bots and horribly divided between big-name community servers and awful matchmaking, it's unlikely we'll ever see another, better range of TF2 action figures. 

Also the big ammunition drum on the minigun is grey when it should be off-white.
Dockin' another point for that one, he's currently at -17/10.