Best Action Figures of 2026

Ten pups, one box, no duplicates. The All Paws On Deck pack covers the whole team in their series uniforms, with molded fur detail that reads well at arm's length. If a child in your house already has the Lookout Tower or a couple of vehicles, this is the box that fills the garage.

The reason we rate it so highly is simpler than the fur detail: completeness. Buying pups one at a time is how you end up with three Marshalls and no Skye. This settles the roster in a single purchase, and the figures are sized to sit in the vehicles and playsets already on the shelf, so nothing new needs buying to make them work.

They're small, thick-limbed and finished in flat paint, which is the combination that survives bath water, mud and a drop off the porch without chipping. Nothing here lights up or talks, so there's no sound chip to quit in a month. And the box is presentable enough to hand over unwrapped, which matters if this is a birthday purchase rather than a Tuesday afternoon one.

Three of the five figures in this box are villains: Doc Ock, Green Goblin and Electro, alongside Spidey and Iron Man. That single fact is why we rate it above the other preschool Marvel packs. A bag of heroes can only stand in a line. A hero and a bad guy can have a fight, and the show the kids are already watching is built on exactly that.

It's the set we reach for when a three-year-old wants to act out an episode rather than line figures up. The figures are four inches with movable heads, arms and legs — enough to sit one on a couch arm and fly another at it — and the chunky limbs and matte paint shrug off the landing. Nothing here needs assembling, charging or explaining.

Size is the thing to think about before you buy. Four inches puts these below the six-inch figures most vehicles and playsets are built around, so they won't sit in a Spider-Man car bought for a bigger scale. The flip side is that two of them fit in a bag for a restaurant or a car ride, which is where most preschool play actually happens.

Look at the feet. The five-inch figures in this pack stand on wide, flat boots, and that's the detail that decides whether a toddler's hero stays upright on carpet or falls over every thirty seconds. Wide feet, thick legs and a low centre of gravity: this is a set designed to be stood up, knocked down and stood up again.

Five characters — Captain America, Spider-Man, Black Panther, Hulk and Iron Spider — plus one accessory each. The paint is simple and the plastic is dense, and the set is inexpensive enough that losing a figure under a couch isn't a tragedy. Nothing about it is precious, which is exactly what you want in a toy that's going to live on the floor.

We like it best as the Marvel starter pack for the under-fours: five recognisable heroes, a size a small hand can actually grip, and accessories that are chunky enough to find again. Older kids will run out of things to do with them fairly quickly, and that's the honest limit — this is a set for the child who carries figures around rather than the one who poses them.

The 14-and-up stamp is the first thing we noticed. This is a Deadpool figure aimed at teenagers and collectors, packaged in a branded window box with the sword visible, and it belongs on a high shelf in a house with younger children rather than in a toy bin. That's not a flaw in the product; it's the product telling you who it's for.

At twelve inches it has real presence for the outlay. The sculpt carries the muscle definition and the mask detail, the glossy finish reads well from across a room, and it lines up with other twelve-inch figures without looking undersized next to them. A figure like this spends most of its life being looked at, and it holds up to that.

It's also sturdier than the price suggests. The plastic is heavy, the joints are simple, and it tolerates being picked up, re-posed badly and put back down by someone who isn't careful. Simple joints are part of why: fewer of them means fewer to loosen, which is the opposite of how most collectors judge a figure and exactly right for this one.

If you're buying for a teenager who likes the character, or for your own shelf, this is an easy recommendation — a big, detailed figure for a small outlay. If you're buying for an eight-year-old who wants to pose him mid-fight, the age rating says wait, and the reasons are printed on the box.

Eight Avengers, one box: Hulk, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Black Panther, Captain America, Spider-Man, War Machine and Falcon, each with a character-specific accessory. As a way to fill a shelf with the whole team in one purchase, nothing else here comes close, and it's the box that settles an argument about who gets to be which hero.

The sculpts are movie-inspired rather than comic-book, which means they sit comfortably next to the Marvel things a kid already owns, and the accessories are the ones children actually reach for — a shield to hold, a hammer to swing. Unboxing is the fun part: eight figures out of one package buys a solid hour of quiet on a rainy afternoon.

Where it gives ground is in the posing. These are display figures at heart. They stand well, they line up well, and eight of them on a shelf reads as a team rather than a collection. That is the trade for getting the whole roster at once, and for a child who arranges figures and narrates a battle, it isn't a trade at all.

Buy this for the roster. If the child in question wants to put a figure mid-swing and leave it there, the playscale Woody or the Dragon Stars Broly will serve them far better, and one of those plus a couple of singles comes out at roughly the same money. The eight-pack is for the kid whose Avengers all stand in a line and get counted.

Twenty-plus points of articulation, and the figure stands on them. That's the short version of why Broly is the one we point to when the point of an action figure is a pose held on a shelf rather than a battle fought on the carpet. Most of the figures here move at the shoulders and call it done; this one gives you enough joints to set a stance and leave it standing unaided.

Two sets of interchangeable hands and character-specific accessories come in the box, which is the difference between a figure that holds an attack pose and one that holds nothing. The hands swap, so the same figure can grip an accessory or open a palm for a blast. Do that swapping over a table; the pieces are small enough to vanish into carpet. The packaging is designed to be kept, and it should be — the anime-styled box does half the display work for you.

The catch is scale. At 6.5 inches it belongs with other 6-inch collector figures, not with the 12-inch display pieces or the 4-inch preschool sets, so decide which shelf it's joining before you order. We also like it best for older kids and adults: twenty-plus joints in a four-year-old's hands is a set of small parts with a schedule. The line runs past seventy characters, so a first Broly is rarely a last one.

Six steps separate robot from truck. That's the design brief for the Cyber Commander Optimus, and it's why this one works where a lot of Transformers don't: the conversion is short enough to memorise and repeat, which is what turns it from a model into a toy.

The conversion is also the risk. Some copies bind at the last fold, so the truck never quite closes, and the head can pop off when the figure takes a tumble. Neither is a reason to skip it; both are reasons to learn the sequence with your kid the first time rather than handing it over cold. Ten minutes of doing it together usually settles whether it clicks for them.

Eleven inches is big enough to matter to a six-year-old and light enough to carry in one hand, and the robot mode holds the red-and-blue silhouette that makes Optimus recognisable across a room. We like it for the kid who flips it back and forth twenty times an hour, because six steps survives that treatment. If the child is three, or wants a figure that stays in one pose while they narrate, look elsewhere — this one is a mechanism first.