Kingdom? Wave 1? Let’s go
Rattrap is the first of the new Core Class figures. And by new Core Class, I mean they’re going Legends again but have changed the name. And by Legends but they’ve changed the name I mean Scout but they changed the name. To start with rat mode, there isn’t much here. No poseability, just a little rat statue… with a lot of panel lines. Actually, I take that back, you can tilt him up on his feet/hind paws a little bit and he won’t fall over. So there we go. Unlike the Generations Deluxe toy there’s no internal space to hide his gun, but it can clip to the outside of either hind leg.
Transformation is pretty cool though – a lot easier than the Deluxe. It’s more complex to line everything up for robot -> rat mode, there are a lot of points where you line up something to clip into a tab, but when you do it stays in place really well. There’s some really nice touches like how you twist the legs around to put them into place. All the articulation except the head is ball joints, and while it works fine for the most part, the shoulder joints are actually on the backpack on account of how the transformation works, and it works out as a bit less versatile than most ball jointed shoulders as a result. There’s a nice mount point on the backpack for the gun if you don’t want it in his hands.
Overall this is a lot more fun to mess around with than Generations Rattrap. Easier to transform, more solid-feeling in robot mode, but a bit less poseable and with less fun gimmicks – Generations Rattrap could split his gun into two smaller weapons and has a concealed gadget in his left forearm. But the Kingdom figure scales way better with his fellow Maximals. I’ve got a big bag full of older CHUG toys I’m planning to trade in on account of getting better versions of the characters recently, but I think I’ll hold on to both of these.
Vertebreak is the first new character in the line, and she’s another Core Class figure. Like the larger Fossiliser toys, she transforms into a dinosaur skeleton, in this case a Dracorex (or maybe a juvenile Pachycephalosaurus, paleontologists disagree). Either way, beast mode looks a bit like a Skeksis, or maybe that one time they used the Skeksis puppets as aliens in Farscape, but a bunch of the latex had rotted off. There’s a little bit more poseability as the beast legs are also the robot ones and the mouth opens, but the dino arms are not poseable at all. There’s better weapon integration on display by virtue of the beast mode tail being the robot mode sword.
Transformation is a straightforward stand up straight, open the ribs, flip around some torso and hey presto. Like Rattrap, most of the joints are ball, but here the exceptions are the hinged knees. Robot mode itself is a nice little affair, with a fantastic headsculpt as the standout detail. And like Rattrap there’s a stowage point on the back for the sword/tail. I really like her, but I don’t know if I wanna get her again in a very bright green as Dracodon? This is at least partially because I think the colour is ugly though.
Blackarachnia is a figure I was looking forward to because she’s one of the most interesting characters in the Beast era, and I never got around to getting the Legends version based on one of her Animated toys – but based on the writeup on TFWiki that might have been a good thing. This one is pretty good though!
Her transformation and beast mode appear to be a simplification of the recent Masterpiece, so there’s a lot of finessing and fiddling to get pieces into place, and it’s very easy for them to pop out – this is most notable underneath where the arms are meant to connect together via a tiny tab, and then the gun connects to the arms via another two tabs – but it’s very easy for any of these to come loose and the gun falls off. But quite impressively, all 8 spider legs have a ball joint halfway up, and they can support her weight quite well.
The other really impressive thing is that this is a female Transformer character that isn’t a redeco of a male character’s toy with a new head, or one with a feminine-coded body and a giant backpack that makes up most of the alt mode! Robot mode is a very accurate recreation of the cartoon’s character model… Which was apparently based on a dancer at a strip club… so yeah. There’s a bit of Hootie McBoob on the go in a way that other female Transformers don’t have, but it’s OK. She’s pretty poseable, but lacks waist swivel.
Cheetor is probably the weakest of the Beast Wars bots, but is still pretty good. Beast mode is fairly functional, the front legs are pretty poseable, the hind ones less so, the tail is just a posed piece, and the mouth opens but there’s no head turning on display. More a cheetah statue, but a decent-looking one. Robot mode looks like Cheetor, has the standard Generations poseability, it’s pretty good but again not a huge amount to say. His only weapon is his tail as a mace, which was a Transmetal Cheetor thing rather than a series 1 one, so no gun for him here.
Paleotrex is a weirdo and a half. He’s the first fossiliser, which is this year’s “pull a robot apart to transform it or use the bits to stick onto another robot” gimmick. Oddly, the Beast Wars characters have practically no 5mm ports, so you’re going to be putting most of these dinosaur bone bits on the G1 characters. That’s certainly a way to do things. And yeah, the head and neck can be removed to make a little version of Optimus Primal’s mace, but like so many of the melee weapons the handle is a bit too short for the weapon to look right in a bot’s hands – Smashdown and Pteraxodon/Terrordaxtyl have this problem in a big way.
Beast mode is a T-rex skeleton, and it looks pretty cool, there’s poseability to spare for the legs, ball-jointed arms at the shoulder, but not much for the neck. The cream and brown colours work amazingly. And then robot mode is this… thing?
Like, back when I got Cog I was like “I can’t wait to Cronenberg the hell out of these bots”, but Paleotrex comes pre-Cronenberged. I believe the kids call this cursed. And I love it. He’s got these dumpy little legs and ultra-long arms, the dino feet are the robot hands with a 5mm port to mount his tail/sword weapon but like PotP Optimus Primal the location of the port means it looks really weird, like it’s sticking out of his thumb. I haven’t really played with the weapon mode options here because the Beast Wars characters aren’t doing the loads of weapon ports thing, and encasing a G1-style bot in the bone armour doesn’t quite work for me.
Warpath is one of those characters I’ve wanted for ages, but the Thrilling 30s figure is hard to get, and that’s pretty much the only other modern version of the character aside from a couple of Legends class versions, one of whom is a redeco of a Megatron to boot. As with a lot of the recent toylines, this is pretty much the original toy/character model updated to modern toy engineering and it’s a great example of how well that can turn out.
Tank mode is a little brick of a thing, with a rotating turret and elevating gun. There’s no gimmicks on display aside from a couple of 5mm ports, but it doesn’t need it. Warpath and Impactor from STE GE make for a good pair of little tanks compared to bigger units like Megatron.
Transformation is phenomenal, with a huge amount of the tank mode being fold out panels hidden in the legs and feet. As well as that, the arms are on this bracket piece that clips into place around the turret for robot mode but swings down to form the back end of the tank. You can even swing it down a bit in robot mode and replicate the G1 toy mode.The only accessory in the set is a binder shield that can be mounted in a few different locations, and looks a lot like a Zaku’s when it’s mounted on the shoulder. It’s essential for keeping the tank mode together though – it clips in at the front on the undercarriage, basically keeping the feet of the robot mode together.
To make things a bit more unfortunate, the weapons for Deluxe figures are taped in place underneath the cardboard inserts for Kingdom, and it’s not obvious they’re there. So if you’re not in the habit of checking the entire box for stuff, it’s easy to miss them, and in this case it’s an essential piece for the transformation. The only other complaint I have is because of part layout on sprues, the forearms are cast in the same grey used for the tank treads and a few other pieces and then painted maroon like the rest of the body, and the coverage isn’t great, leading to some grey poking through on the edges, as well as the 5mm ports and the mount point for a blast effect being unpainted. A minor thing but it draws the eye.
Cyclonus was a figure I was on the shelf about but some positive reviews got me excited and I grabbed him. And he’s a weird one. Like, the design and engineering and all that are great, he’s definitely a better toy than the Combiner Wars one… But the plastic feels weird. It’s not that nylon that was used on Apeface, but it’s not the same as the usual stuff Hasbro uses, and between it and some really tight tolerances it feels almost like a really good KO. I’d be suspicious if I hadn’t bought it from Smyth’s and it arrived at the same time the rest of the Wave 1 bits I bought from them.
Leaving that aside, There’s some fantastic design work on the go here to go from mostly show-accurate robot to mostly show-accurate jet. That super-long nose is actually three segments that fold inside each other and then into the chest , almost like a Matryoshka doll of transformer parts. Like Warpath’s nice trick with the arm assembly, here Cyclonus’ ones are actually connected to the cockpit and clamp securely to the shoulders, so when you transform him you flip them up and rotate the cockpit assembly 180 degrees to get them into place.
There’s a lot of extra work done here that makes Cyclonus very much not the usual robot with a plane on his back/plane with a robot strapped underneath, and I appreciate that a lot. It’s a very good example about how Hasbro seem to have arbitrarily split their almost obsessively cartoon accurate Animated Movie figures between Kingdom and SS86, because he’d fit in almost perfectly beside Kup and presumably the other SS86 figures I’ve been eyeing up but haven’t bought yet.
Optimus Primal. So, Beast Wars passed me by at the time it was a thing. I was vaguely aware of it but never caught the show or I think even saw the toys? I was well out of toy buying at the time, only coming back to Transformers when Masterpiece Prime and BINALTech were a thing. Which is a bit of a way to say I have never held the original Ultra-Class Optimus Primal, the closest I have is the Robot Masters version of the toy. Which based on video reviews of the original seems to be quite close? Anyway, this version of the figure is less close to the original than that, but only slightly.
Beast mode here offers a bit more than the Robot Masters version of the character at least – between a wrist swivel, opening fingers and a ball-jointed head there’s more poseability, and thanks to a pair of swivel joints in the knees, you can play around with the leg positioning for the standard “hide the robot bits under a monkey butt of older versions of Primal, but also have him stand up well enough like he often did on the show. There’s a lot of fur-like texture as well as some slightly softer plastic, making for a nice, natural feel. Beast mode head is more of a naturalistic gorilla than the animation model. It works, but I might have preferred show accuracy there?
Transformation to robot mode is almost identical to the Robot Masters and original toy. The big difference here is that the robot and beast mode heads are on a rotating block in the middle of the torso, and you hinge the back away from the chest to access and flip the block around. This is also how you flip out the shoulder cannons. The main new thing here is a few large panels used to hide robot bit in beast mode fold up and away to make for a neat back, with a little bit of detail that even resembles Primal’s jets.
For robot mode, there’s a lot of weapon features – both forearms have the standard double-barrelled guns, here deployed by pushing on panels on the inside of the forearms that poke them out the other side, as well as the aforementioned shoulder cannons, and a pair of impressively large swords. We’re deep in give some, lose some territory here – the shoulder cannons are quite small, closer to the Masterpiece ones than the proportionally larger and show-accurate Robot Master. The swords are much larger proportionally than the original or Robot Master versions,which is good because they look cool but less good because you can’t store them internally – there are points on his back that the swords can be mounted on, but they’re heckin’ huge, so it doesn’t always look good.
Overall though, this is a very good figure, well worth seeking out. It definitely catches the feel of the character very well, especially in robot mode, is fun to handle and just transform… Another good entry into the line
Megatron So, Beast Wars passed me by at the time it was a thing. I was vaguely aware of it but never caught the show or I think even saw the toys? I was well out of toy buying at the time, only coming back to Transformers when Masterpiece Prime and BINALTech were a thing. Which is a bit of a way to say I have never held the original Ultra-Class Megatron, the closest I have is the Robot Masters version of the toy. Which based on video reviews of the original seems to be quite close? Anyway, this version of the figure is less close to the original than that, but only slightly.
The big thing here is the change of colours. The T-rex mode hews close to the original, with a richer purple replacing the lavender, and a more natural beige underbelly, but the robot mode goes in heavily for indigo and red where the original toy had black and the CGI character model has purples. It works, but it doesn’t feel quite right.
The T-rex mode is very impressive though, and a lot of it is engineering bits that aren’t visible unless you know what’s going on, like some panels in the neck that cover up robot bits, but are spring-loaded so they move with the head. The way the hips work is amazing, with these huge panels that swing down around the robot mode legs, but are mounted on rails and move with the robot hip joints to keep everything moving smoothly.
Transformation is mostly smooth sailing, but there’s a bit where you have to unclip the torso from the hips and reposition it for beast mode, clipping it into a small connector that’s hidden in the waist, and it’s a right pain and I feel that it’s a potential point of failure for the future.
The other big thing here is a lack of features and accessories. Not that I think you need such things to properly make a toy, and it’s not like the Beast Wars cartoon used the Megatron toy’s weapon features like Optimus Primal did… But there’s basically a 5mm port hidden in the mouth, two more on the feet and that’s it. a blast effect to put coming out of the mouth would have been nice, but this is relatively minor as an issue. There are a lot of engineering marvels on display here and it’s not like they skimped on the budget. Gets a definite yesssssss from me.
So with Wave 1 in the bag, Kingdom definitely lives up to STE GE and Earthrise as a line so far. The only complaint I have overall – and it is very minor – is that the Beast Wars characters lack mount points for the Fossiliser weapon and armour modes. I don’t hugely care for how they look attached to the more G1 characters, but the figures themselves are so weird on their own that they’re just fine as strange robots that turn into skeletons.
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lorcan_nagle.
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