Re: Batman Arkham Origins grapnel gun replica coming from NECA
My grapnel replica arrived yesterday. I have to say that for the $35 cost I am happy with it. Here's a brief review. Click photos for larger versions.
The grapnel gun. First out of the box you realize just how massive the prop is (more on this later). It does, as Forge noted, only come with one claw rather than the two that were advertised for pre-order. The tips are foam, but they don't look that bad. They would be easily replaced with styrene, or you can dry brush a bit of silver paint to disguise their material a bit.
Paint and finish is nice, and they've done a serviceable job of minimizing seam lines and hiding the screws with little plugs (seen above). Since this is not a prop I've seen in extreme detail, the plugs don't stand out to me when I look at it.
The other side:
No screw plugs on this side. I've also changed the angle of the grip in this photo to its other extreme.
As I mentioned above, the prop is rather large and chunky. In photos, it doesn't look so bad scale-wise (see above), but in hand, I can barely get my first knuckle around the grip. With such a precarious grip I wouldn't want to be hanging from this thing hundreds of feet in the air, lol. This is accurate to the game art, though, so it's no fault of NECA. If you look at screenshots the in-game Batman also has a rather tenuous grip.
But yeah, it's still really big. You don't realize just how comically over-sized the design is until you compare to a previous grapnel...
Interesting to see a few design cues travel from the old to the new, though.
The action features: The grapnel gun will fire the claw attachment when you pull the trigger, and reel it back in when you push the button on the rear of the gun. The reel in the butt of the gun visually spins as well. The string is about 4-5 feet long (it would have been better were this black instead of white).
There's a specific trick to loading the thing to work properly and it's not described well in the instructions. After firing, push the button to reel in the claw to where its shaft is just at the end of the barrel. Then, push the shaft into the gun all the way until you hear it click into place. Finally, tap the reel button a few times to take up the remainder of the slack in the string. If you don't it will jam and not fire, but once I figured this out it fired reliably every time.
I will say that you shouldn't put any weight on the reel mechanism as it seems like the gears on mine slip sometimes. Hopefully that is by design and not due to wear (it happened soon after opening). Better safe than sorry.
To sum up... At $35 it's a steal for a rather nice & faithful prop, with moving parts (grip, reel, claws). As a bonus it has a silly though admittedly fun action feature.
Here's one more photo with the Arkham Asylum batarang:
