I was lukewarm on the Halo 4 Series 1 Extended Watcher and pretty cold toward the Cortana figure, so I figured it was time to cover a figure from McFarlane Toys’ second wave of Halo 4 toys that I’m actually mostly pleased with. That figure is another of the Forerunner AIs, the Promethean Crawler. The Halo 4 Crawler figure is decently big, full of articulation, and more than capable of washing the bad taste out of my mouth from some other recent Halo 4 figures…

The Right:

Initially, I had no clue how McFarlane Toys was going to tackle their Promethean Crawler figure. The quadruped Crawlers are fully unlike anything McFarlane had done for Halo before, so I had my concerns that they might end up being undersized, articulation-less statues or otherwise messed up. I really didn’t know what to expect. But what we ended up with is almost everything we could have hoped for in a 6″ scale Halo 4 Crawler toy.

My primary fear was a lack of flexibility, so let me cover that first. The Crawlers that McFarlane Toys have designed have a whopping 26 points of articulation. The Crawler has swivel mandibles, two ball-hinge joints on his neck, a ball-jointed midsection, ball-jointed hips, ball-hinge feets, ball-hinge knees on his front legs, and swivel knees on his back legs. I honestly thought this figure would be almost totally inflexible, so seeing all of this articulation integrated is pretty impressive.

My favorite moving parts on this Crawler figure are definitely the ones on and surrounding the head. I love that the Crawler can open and close his mandibles to bite or fire a beam, and the way his head can be rotated to look all around gives him tons of character (and turning his head sideways, this devil dog can almost even look kind of cute!).

And as for being undersized, well–the Halo Crawler figure is freaking huge. It’s so huge that it barely even fits into the bubble it’s packaged on, and easily towers over the miniscule Watcher figure it’s shipping alongside. This Crawler toy is large and imposing and definitely fearsome enough that a pack of these would make even the Master Chief wet himself.

As with the Watcher I reviewed previously, McFarlane Toys did a swell job on the Halo 4 Forerunner Crawler’s paint, as it looks just close enough to steel to look realistic, and the gold paint accenting it stands out nicely. There’s a couple stray black paint smudges on my Crawler, but they blend in so nicely on this figure that they don’t really bother me.

The Wrong:

As far as making merchandise goes, a major flaw of the Promthean Crawler’s design is that he has a bulky upper body that has to be held up by spindly little legs. While that may work out all find and good in video games, it’s tough to translate that stability into an action figure. This is the one place where McFarlane Toys really stumbles with their Crawler figure. The joints on its legs and knees are just not quite strong enough to properly support the Crawler in most poses. A good deal of the time, you’ll get the Crawler posed just the way you want, and then his leg joints will give out totally and he’ll collapse onto himself. The Crawler either needed reinforced ratchet joints or a figure stand to compensate for the figure’s upper-body weight.

Additionally, the one place McFarlane really blew it with the articulation on this figure is the rear legs. The Crawler’s rear knees look like they’re designed as ball-hinge joints, but they really only function as swivel knees. It doesn’t sound like a huge deal, given the tons of other articulation built into this figure, but it hinders the Halo 4 Crawler’s posing potential a lot more than you’d expect.

“Where Can I Buy It?!”

Just like the rest of Halo 4 Series 1 Extended, the Promethean Crawler has been a real pain to find at retail stores (and perhaps even harder than his case-mates, as a lot of collectors want to army-build Crawlers). The only online store I’ve seen keep the Crawlers consistently stocked at about retail price is Amazon, so they earn my recommendation again.

Overall: The McFarlane Halo 4 Series 1 Wave 2 Crawler is almost an excellent figure, but has a few flaws that hold him back. The overall weight of the upper-body on this figure is too great for his tiny ball-jointed legs and knees to hold up in most instances, and his swivel rear-knees don’t function nearly as well as you might hope. Even so, the Crawler is a large and intimidating 100% new Halo 4 action figure that turned out far better than I expected it to. There’s way more articulation than I anticipated, the deco on the figure looks great, and it’s definitely a figure worth looking past its downsides and army-building.