I tend to be very particular about Izubuchi designs. Izubuchi was the designer who designed the MS in Char's Counterattack, Gundam 0080, and many of the Zeon machines in Gundam ZZ - as well as various other things like Patlabor, Gasaraki, the Zudah from MS Igloo, the costumes in Gundam Wing, etc... Anyway, I generally enjoy his work and tend to be rather picky about how it's represented in model kit form...
I have to say that the HGUC Char's Counterattack line in general has been great. The HGUC Geara Doga is a prime example. I have a few minor complaints about the kit but overall I think Bandai's really succeeded in producing a good kit of this excellent Zeon design.
My first issue with the kit is that the shield, as on the old 1988 version, is hollow. The back side of the shield is supposed to be flat (not concave) with some surface details on the back... The HGUC lineart actually shows this, but unfortunately they didn't retain this in the actual kit.
My second issue with the kit has to do with the head and chest block. There's a slight oddity to the shape of the kit here. I don't think it's quite right to call the parts "inaccurate" but there's always these kinds of issues when making a 3-d design out of a 2-d design... It can look great from one angle and terrible from another. That's how I feel about the chest and head on this kit. From most viewpoints they look great - but from a few angles they look rather amorphous. Specifically, views from the front, especially low-angle views are very unflattering to this kit IMO. Unfortunately, this is also the viewpoint they used for the cover of the assembly manual, and the same shot is seen a lot online - so the photos in online store listings tend to be rather unflattering. I think making the chest block a bit wider and flattening the top of the head a bit would help quite a bit.
There are a few other, lesser issues which also bug me a bit: the "cables" at the knee are rather small (quite a bit smaller than on the old kit)... There's a forward grip on the beam machine gun which can swing out - on the kit this is represented by a peg-and-hole assembly which looks rather crude and out-of-scale... The shield is mounted to the forearm via an ugly C-shaped ring thing that plugs into (and wraps around) the forearm, providing two pegs upon which the shield may be mounted. (Fortunately, it would be pretty simple to get rid of that junk and just use a piece of styrene rod to link the forearm to the shield...) Finally, the beam machine gun included with the green Geara Doga replicates the sliding-stock gimmick, but unfortunately in doing this they created this nasty deep groove down each side of the rod on which the stock slides. Personally I'd build that weapon with the stock retracted unless I was prepared to fill in those grooves, or replace the rod altogether. Finally, the segments of the power cables on the waist are too large. In the original design the cables are made up of a lot of very short segments, each maybe with a length of about half the thickness of the cable. On the kit they are more like what you see on Zaku kits, with each segment a little longer than it is wide...
In terms of accessories: there are two variants of the kit and they each include different stuff. The green one includes a beam axe/beam pick and the Geara Doga's standard beam machine gun, while the blue one includes a beam saber (in addition to the axe and pick) and a bullpup-style beam machine gun. The beam axe and beam saber are actually the same weapon - in the anime the Geara Doga's beam saber includes an extending handle, and apertures both at the end of the weapons and at the side. Each kit actually includes both types of beam saber hilt (extended and retracted) but only the blue one includes clear parts for both the saber and axe modes.
As with most modern HGUC kits the Geara Doga includes good injection-molded hands standard. Rather than being assembled from two parts - "hand" and "back of hand" as with kits like the HGUC Zaku II, the grip hands are molded from three parts each - the first being the palm and the first segment of each finger, the second being the thumb and the remaining segments of each finger, and the third being the armor plate for the back of the hand. Hands like these aren't quite as good as B-Club parts in terms of detail, but they're good enough that I could build the kit without feeling compelled to find a decent alternative to the stock hands. Again, there's a bit of disparity between the two versions of the kit: Both kits include a gun-hand and a saber-hand for the right, but the green one includes a saber-hand for the left, while the blue one includes an open hand for the left.
A modestly poseable, reasonably detailed monoeye was a very nice touch on this kit. The monoeye only gets about 15 degrees movement in either direction (it'd be hard to get more than that anyway, with the design of the visor) and there's no clear part for the visor itself (it'd be hard to put one in, for space reasons) - the eye part itself includes some nice "background detail" for the rail on which the eye rides, but the actual eye itself is, unfortunately, just a blank circle. Clear parts for a lens, or some modest detail on the eye itself would have been nice - though this of course would complicate matters for snap-builders.
Clearly I have a few complaints with the kit but overall I think it's fantastic. In some of the HGUC Gundam 0080 line I felt like the new kits, while better in some ways, were worse in others, or just still wrong but in different ways. I'm happy to say that's not the case with the HGUC Geara Doga. The old kit was fairly good but like most kits of that era it had some serious flaws. Where the new kit is better, it's unquestionably better. Where the new kit is mediocre, the effect really isn't that bad. And there are very few ways in which the new kit could be considered worse than the old one.
