Marvel Legends Bloodstorm REVIEW (Strange Tales Blackheart Series Figure)

Products You May Like

If you put Bloodstorm on your 2024 Marvel Legends Bingo board, you deserve to give yourself a monstrous pat on the back right now. Vampire Storm is a character I’m quite fond of, but never thought I’d see the day she’d be on my shelf in plastic form. But against the odds Marvel Legends Bloodstorm is real and now shipping out; here’s my review of whether you should own Hasbro’s blood-sucking Ororo Monroe…

For those unacquainted with this iteration of Storm, there have actually been several instances of Dracula turning her into a vampire across the Marvel multiverse.

I believe this specific version in the Cullen Bunn-created Bloodstorm from his 2017 X-Men Blue series, rather than the 1999 Mutant X variant. That said, the two look similar enough that you can easily use the figure as your choice in your display (not that I’d expect to ever see any Mutant X-specific figures released by Hasbro, mind you).
Bloodstorm is part of the supernatural-leaning Strange Tales Marvel Legends wave, which is honestly the most sensible place to release a niche horror-esque figure like this one.

I mentioned in my reviews of Hellverine and 90s Moon Knight that I really liked the new slimmer boxes, which remains true here. Sliding the figure tray out of the bottom of the boxes actually feels kind of fun to me, for some odd reason.

Marvel Legends Bloodstorm comes with four accessories: a rad second interchangeable head, a pair of gesturing hands and the body of the Marvel Legends Blackheart Build-A-Figure (the single biggest piece of the BAF). The gesturing hands are nice, since you can pretend Bloodstorm is using her wind powers (as no effects are included, sadly).

The gritted teeth alternate head is an intimidating look, and I genuinely can’t decide if I prefer posing Ororo with her vampire mouth opened or closed. Both heads are terrific, which is one of the defining highlights of the toy.

The plastic quality feels solid all-around and none of Bloodstorm’s joints feel loose, although the figure does feature the “slip and slide” style of belt that I thought we were long past. Belts that loosely. wobble everywhere like this one drive me up the wall.The super-articulation scheme is decent, but below the level of today’s best female Legends 6” figures. The elbows are ball-hinge instead of double-jointed, the knees have visible pins and there’s no butterfly shoulders or boot/calf swivels. Storm has never been a character needing ninja-level flexibility, but I think the articulation here could have been improved.

Overall: I teetered on the edge awarding this Marvel Legends Bloodstorm figure a grade, but ultimately the coolness factor of such a deep cut variant with two killer heads nosed her just over an average score. The pinned knees aren’t especially noticeable on Bloodstorm’s dark grey pants, but still bother me, as does her loosely-goose belt. The total lack of any kind of weather effects disappoints me as well. Even so, this is a really exciting character variant for Hasbro to pick, and the toy really does look great with either head in place. A very fun action figure for fans of this character, though those unfamiliar with Bloodstorm won’t find anything to get hyped about here.