Final Faction Action Figures (Dollar Tree, Family Dollar)

Joshua also contributed to this post.

People who collect action figures, dolls, etc. may be willing to spend more than the average person on certain exclusives and limited editions. But what about spending, say, $1.25 on an action figure? That’s the deal that Dollar Tree is giving us for action figures and weapons packs. We wanted to see if they were any good and if they’re worth anything to a fan or collector.

Final Faction is an action figure set exclusive to Dollar Tree. The sets are made by Greenbrier International, which is the Dollar Tree company.

However, we’ve also spotted Final Faction figures inside Family Dollar stores. Family Dollar is owned by Dollar Tree, so this isn’t a total surprise. What is a surprise is that there are at least a couple of Final Faction toys you can get at Family Dollar that you can’t at Dollar Tree, because they’re more expensive.

It’s also interesting that the Final Faction toys sold in Family Dollar are sold by Midwood Brands, which is the Family Dollar company name.

The Cartoon:

Final Faction has … its own cartoon series.

The first episode is pretty generic. Heroes with guns kill the evil space aliens. The graphics resemble video game graphics, but overall it wasn’t bad. There is only one female character currently available, and when I stumbled upon her hidden in a box at the store, being a Star Wars and Marvel fan, I decided to grab her, along with all the other characters Dollar Tree had at the time: three villains from series one, and three other heroes from series two.

On the back of the series two packages, it doesn’t show you all of the characters, it simply shows their silhouettes and advertises that they’re coming soon. This could very well mean the action figures are selling decently and the company is going to continue releasing new characters into the future.

Along with the figures, I also picked up one hero weapons pack and one villain weapons pack.

The Heroes:

Starting off with the heroes, I got the female character Shift, along with Scope, Torn, and a dog named Churro who is a companion to one of the series one main characters, Steadfast.

Churro is a small chihuahua who comes with a robotic dog suit you can put the dog inside. Once you put him in, he’s essentially loose inside, and you sometimes have to shake it bit to get him back out, but it doesn’t look like there’s any severe risk of him getting stuck.

Scope and Torn are detailed nicely. However, they both have the same issue. Both characters include guns that can fit into holsters molded to their legs. At first I was surprised and impressed at the idea that you could actually store your guns on the character when you’re not using them. One small problem though: There is no back on the holster, so the guns slide out before you even start playing. Scope’s stay in better for some reason, but no such luck for Torn. His fall out even when you’re just displaying him. Along with that, Torn has a hood that looks like it clips on the back of his suit, but the attachment doesn’t stay, and it falls off about as quickly as the guns.

One other interesting detail: the back of Torn’s head is an alien, which you can twist to the front, which is why he wears the hood. I don’t know if this is something related to the episodes; however, I could see a kid having fun with that.

The only items Shift comes with are two swords molded together that attach to her back, and they stay on fine. I thought it was cool that all of the heroes had holes in their backs so you can arm them with the different weapons that have pegs. Torn has holes on his arms, too, where you can attach the swords he comes with. I’m usually most worried about the faces. They can often come out defective. This is a problem even major toy brands can struggle with. Luckily, all of the faces on my characters came out fine, which is promising.

The hero weapons pack I got was the Covert Ops pack, which included a variety of gadgets, including guns, a drone, and a “Stratus board” the characters can fly on. I thought the coolest thing about this set wasn’t the actual pieces, but the back of the packaging. On the back, each of the weapons are named, along with what they can do. Each was highly detailed, and I respect that a lot.

The Villains:

Now for the villains. They’re all your generic space aliens, but they all have a fun uniqueness to them. The villains are all part of the Kharn, a group that the packaging says wants to plunder Earth’s natural resources. There is a Drone, which is your average evil alien. There’s also a Brute, which is really just a larger version of a Drone, and a Synthoid, which is the coolest in my opinion.

I purchased the Shock Arms weapons pack, but if you were to get the Synthoid weapons pack, you would receive a second set of literal arms that you could swap out with the originals on the Synthoid. This is both good and bad, since the arms now have a habit of falling off sometimes. Both the Drone and Brute come with guns that clip in relatively easily and stay in their hands. The Shock Arms weapons pack only comes with three guns, but like the Covert Ops pack, it has the names of the weapons and what they do on the back. One of the guns has the Dollar Tree company name Greenbrier on the top, which we found mildly funny.

As a doll collector, I look for a couple of things when purchasing a product. Mainly quality and price point. These toys obviously have a cheap price, and I have to say, the quality surprised me, from the detail on the armor to the fact that the figures have a bit of weight to them. There are flukes here and there, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t expect that. The thing I probably appreciated the most was that every character, both hero and villain, had a small paragraph about the character, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. I really appreciate this because of the fact that someone had to create those character backgrounds.

Same with the weapons packs. Someone got to use their imagination and create different characters with different origins and facts about them, and it makes the characters that much cooler, knowing where they come from and what they’ve accomplished.

The Verdict:

I would recommend these, but to a certain audience. If you collect action figures for the sake of collecting as many as you can, then these are for you. Any kid who’s into sci fi and the Marvel universe could get some play with these. If you collect higher end action figures, I wouldn’t say you shouldn’t get them, but realize what you’re purchasing. In the end, it’s up to you, but I can tell you that these exceeded my expectations in more ways than I thought.