Surviving distribution hell, Galen Erso was made available as part of the final Rogue One wave. The figure doesn’t look particularly exciting, and despite what they say, in this case, you can judge a book by its cover.

The figure stands, interacts well with the accessories, and has decent paint job…or at least decent as far as the simply colored uniform goes.  The design of the uniform itself is reminiscent of Kirk’s in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but that’s the way it was in the movie, and Hasbro duplicated it well.  The problem is the face.  If you squint real hard, you can pretend that it’s Mads Mikkelsen’s likeness, but it really isn’t that good.  Maybe the sculpt is great, but you sure can’t tell because the face paint applications are terrible.  Even this guy has a better beard.  Hasbro can do better, and they have shown that faces have been a strong point of the frustrating 5POA line. In this case, they dropped the ball, so the figure suffers.

Where the figure shines is with the accessories.  It comes with an MSE droid, with rolling wheels.  And while the kid-friendly accessory is not relevant to the film in any way, it’s actually pretty neatly executed.  Even this otherwise dull figure looks awesome and dynamic (see image above) when zip lining out of an AT-ACT.  So Galen Erso and I have two things in common.  We’ve both zip-lined, and we’ve both built massive, planet-destroying weaponry.  Well, one of those is true.

The big draw for this figure is that it would probably take a miracle for Hasbro to ever make a Galen Erso super-articulated figure.  So in the meantime, this is the only way to own a 3.75” plastic representation of the guy who made it easy for Luke Skywalker to murder well over a million people.

It loses credit for bad face paint, but gets it back for cool accessories.