Ah, mail is always a good way to start off a morning. Especially when it chock full of new goodies. (⌒▽⌒)☆

It’s an envelope inside of an envelope because Arealight had decided to ship it EMS, I received it in about 3 business days.

So then let’s see what we have here!

A bag of freebies and new product! A closer look you say? Alright let’s just get straight to it then. I personally like to put all of my orders into a little bin after dumping them out of the baggie~ It makes it so much easier to keep track of that way while I’m going through new things before I stow them away for future use!

Well… here is the new line up! I left some of the test prints and old product in the bin~. (Please note capes and such are resin cast and will not be re-released for some time unfortunately. (シ_ _)シ Arealight was just nice enough to send me a few old things.)

So here we go! I’m sure all of you are quite curious about the new product that we have. As you can see, we have quite a few new things coming out! Think of this as your little sneak preview. We’re adding quite a few things to the 501st (Blue trooper) line as well as adding a few new things to the shadow trooper line! And the poor lonely Thire will now have a commander Fox to go with him! So how about we put these helmets to “good” use~!

Ah there we go. Much better! I hope you don’t mind the random torsos on some of them! I was just a bit lacking when it came to black clone trooper torsos. ( ≧Д≦) I also had some trouble putting together all of the 501st figures as well. There are so many now after all!

Alright now how about we get this review started! All of these helmets are based off of the clone wars or extended universe. I’ll start us off with something relatively familiar. The good old blue 501st designs. As you can see, we have a 501st ARF trooper(who is based off of Boomer from the Clone Wars Games), Kix (From Season 4 Clone wars Umbara Arc) and a 501st AT-RT trooper (ARC Heavy Gunner).

So I suppose I’ll start from the left front row. The 501st ARF print is actually pretty nice. It’s a Lego blue color, so you’ll have no problem matching it; as with any of Arealight’s other blue clone trooper helmets. The helmet sports a crisp blue printing on the sun visor a long with a line down the center. There is also a bit of blue and black detail print for the face details. All in all, this is definitely a pretty nice helmet. A great helmet to pick up if you want a blue ARF trooper. Or just one of the ARF helmets in general.

Next up is the Kix helmet. I personally have always liked Kix’s design. The Kix helmet sports blue printing around the visor and on the back details of the helmet. It’s printed onto a commander helmet, but since it’s open visor; you end up with a white gap between the head and the blue print. I personally never found this too big of an issue; but if you do there’s always the option to paint the white area black or whatever color the head underneath is. Of course, if you liked the Umbara arc; you’d probably want to pick Kix up to add to your collection.

And then we have the 501st AT RT helmet. Out of all of the helmets Arealight’s printed, I believe this one was the one that’s given him the most trouble. It took several attempts, but Arealight was finally able to produce one he felt he could release. There are a few print issues, like the eyes not being fully covered and the top visor having a bit of white. However, it’s still a pretty decent match to the reference material. In all honesty i think it looks pretty good for the odd shape of the helmet.

More pictures you say? Well. Here are the side and hind shots. As you can see, the back doesn’t wrap all the way around on the ARF helmet unfortunately.

And just for fun… Here is a shot of all of the helmets with blue printing that Arealight has produced!
As you can see, there are quite a few…＼(>o<)ノ I was actually a bit surprised at how many there where..

Anyways, moving on to the three in the back!
Here’s a Shadow Clone Trooper, Commander Fox (Clone wars season 4), and a Shadow Airborne Trooper (Unfortunately I don’t have a picture for this, but it’s essentially a black version of the Utapu Airborn trooper).

So Let’s start off with the shadow clone trooper. The helmet sports a Silver and Gunmetal print. The small details on the side are a gunmetal color while the face details and the markings around the fin are a silver color. While I know I say this about a lot of the helmets, this has to be one of my favorites. It just… works. It’s simple yet effective I guess you could say. I’m just a bit disappointed I wasn’t able to show it off with a matching torso.

Next up is the Fox helmet. I think arealight did a really good job with matching the reference material. He actually decided to hold off on the release of this until he was able to get Dark bluish grey sunvisors made to match the show. (You can see this above.) The main issue again is that Arealight still hasn’t been able to perfect the art of printing white on dark colors. So your helmets may have some “off white” on the white areas. Otherwise the helmet looks great. Something nice for any clone wars fan.

Now for the last of this weeks release. The Shadow Airborne trooper. This helmet sports a silver and gunmetal print. While I don’t like it as much as the Commander helmet version, I still think the silver and gunmetal just works. Those two colors go great on black and honestly this helmet is no exception to that. This printing on this helmet is actually perfectly aligned with the grooves as well. This is definitely something nice for those people who want to build up their own little group of shadow clone troopers.

And now for a few more side and back shots!

And just for a bit of fun. Here is a group shot of the 3 Shadow troopers together~

As for an added bonus here’s a little shot of the new version of the Neyo helmet. Honestly Arealight did a fantastic job of revamping it, my only issue is the skewed 91st emblem.

Anyways, Over all this was a fantastic release. I can easily recommend picking up any of the helmets. They’re all really just lovely parts. And honestly, I feel this is probably one of the better releases this year.

Anyways, until next time. I hope you enjoyed this review, I decided to update my review “style” a bit to try and make it a bit more fun.

Happy customizing! (,, ･∀･)ﾉ゛