Original Review by Chris 2/25/2014:

Battle Droids are useless.  If you think that’s just more of the standard Bantha Skull prequel hate, it’s not.  I’m merely quoting the man whose pen breathed life into the Battle Droids.  You can hear that quote in the very funny (but obscene) Mr. Plinkett reviews of the PT.  This uselessness was by design to show the ineffectiveness of a droid army against sentient beings.  Of course Lucas is about as subtle as Austin Powers on the prowl, so instead of crafting a plot where the automatons inability to think creatively proved a fatal strategic disadvantage at a key moment, he made them completely and unavoidably useless.  He beat you over the head with it.  Even the endless logic loop trope would have been preferable to show the inferiority of the droid army instead of turning the Battle Droids into Larry, Moe and Curly.  And not the good Curly.  Curly Joe DeRita.

This useless theme pervades the Battle Droids down to their physical form.  They’re not much more than a painted skeleton with off the charts fragility.  All of this introduction is meant to merely illustrate that LFL put Hasbro behind the eight ball when trying to translate this form into a 3.75” scale action figure.  Hasbro either has to take liberties with the scaling to make a more substantial figure, or produce a faithful on-screen representation and end up with a flimsy action figure like the one we have here.  They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.  We’d complain either way.  The limbs on my figure fold and collapse with the speed of an imploding casino.  Again, I hold LFL accountable for this. 

Where Hasbro themselves disappoint is that this rendition of the Battle Droid cannot plug the blaster into the backpack.  That was one of the best features of the previous releases.  So even though it folds up well for transport, there is nowhere to stow the blaster.  When the head is pushed down into the retracted position, the braids on the back of the head pop the backpack off.  But I’ll put that back on LFL.  While I cannot hold Hasbro accountable for the failings that this figure has, that doesn’t mean I can give it a good score.  As with the Vintage Collection Episode I based release, this gets a D grade.  6 out of 10.

Updated Review by Bret 5/28/2020:

This is a repaint of the Episode I-themed VC78 Battle Droid.  It was a decent figure, but hit right at the time of the Great Walmart TPM Debacle of 2012, from which we have still yet to recover almost 8 years later.  It has its flaws, as Chris noted in his review above.  The main one being that it can’t stow the blaster on its backpack.  It also is very thin and flimsy, and you may have some difficulty keeping it upright. 

This is an example, sadly, of how Hasbro did their best to get us a film accurate action figure, but at the cost of its feasibility as a toy/collectible.  The thin limbs not only make it almost…ethereal, but also seem to preclude the possibility of engineering articulated wrists which would allow a THWG.

The figure is simply painted, with only the one small metallic flaw right on the face.  The rest of the droid is factory new, which would probably be accurate for these guys as they were churned out of the Geonosian foundries and straight into battle.  The TVC figure has some really nicely executed weathering over the entire body (minus the head and the backpack, for some reason.). This is a departure from that, albeit logically so.

Generally, it’s a nice version of the Battle Droid, and arguably the best one available, although there are a couple of similar ones in the Geonosis Arena Showdown 2-packs from 2009/2010.  Until Hasbro can figure out the wrists, this is going to have to suffice for your AOTC battle droid needs.  6/10.
 
This figure comes with the torso of the TC-70 build-a-droid.