Before NECA grabbed hold of a legit chunk of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy license, Predator was their best-selling property. Now, they constantly crank out TMNT, and we wonder if the latest Predator movie will get more than one action figure. Did the Yautja fanbase lose their enthusiasm, or is it that classic movies just do better? After many figures that reused basic body types, we finally have an all-new one for Prey, and frankly, it deserves fan support. The movie itself was praised by fans and critics alike, and the creature got a more substantial redesign than it had since the invention of the Berserker Preds in the third movie.
The Feral Predator, as he’s officially known, is out now, and if we play our cards (and pay our dollars) right, there’ll be a few more variants before the movie’s concepts are tapped out.
One of the simultaneous pluses and minuses of NECA Predator figures is that they tend to be quite intricate. The good part of that is the minute level of detail, which is astounding. The bad part is the amount of small parts that can easily get lost or broken. One nifty solution Feral has, for the first time, is that his backpack attaches with a magnet. It still has room to move to various positions around his back, but it’ll stay on. There are other fiddly bits still — longtime NECA collectors may have learned to look at the bottom panel of the box to see if there are any instructions, and this time there are.
Follow Directions
Let’s go through those one by one. Feral comes with three interchangeable sets of mandibles — closed, wide open, and semi-open. Remove them altogether, and he looks like a bird — he’d make a decent base in this form for the Egyptian god Ra.
It’s an easy switch-out and never feels like anything might break. Plus, the skull mask fits over all of them. NECA doesn’t generally do removable masks on Predators, under the logic that the helmet heads on set were usually entirely separate heads, and that’s what they’ll therefore do as well. The skull, however, is a much smaller mask than most, and presumably, on set, it was an add-on rather than a whole separate headpiece.
Open wide!
Snikt-snikt-snikt, Bub-bub-bub…
The arm blades are often one of the frailest parts on a Predator figure — here, there are just two, and they individually stick into his knuckles. Not too deep, though; they can easily fall out or get knocked out, so if you play with this guy at all, watch out for those. At least he doesn’t look completely lost without them. This Predator is much more of a nudist, which is weird since the species requires heat, and the great plains in prey looked colder than any prior such slayground.
His left-arm bracer includes a slot to plug in the shield, which comes in both folded and unfolded versions. It sticks in pretty well for both but might come out if you like to knock your figures together to simulate fights. Even NECA’s genius engineers aren’t going to make the full-on fan shield that can open and close — it would up the price by far too much anyway.
Though I’m calling it a fan shield because it fans out, it could also keep away zealous fans, perhaps, if indeed this creature has any, in-universe.
Staff Secrets
So now we get to the collapsed staff, which attaches to the back of the belt with two little s-hooks. Possibly the fiddliest detail, and one likely to inspire everyone to use the full staff for display anyway, it nonetheless works. Stick those little S’s in the belt, and they will hold the collapsed staff nicely.
The magnetic backpack attaches pretty much anywhere on the upper torso but can easily rotate to the side.
Give the Guy a Hand
He comes with probably more hands than anyone really needs — most will presumably use the one that holds the spear. But this Predator’s blaster has an unusual quirk. rather than attaching to his backpack for a shoulder cannon, it’s hand held. So he needs a hand for that, too.
Check out more images of the figure in action below.
