Seems like I can’t go a week without adding more Transformers to my collection, and I’m not complaining about it. The Fall of Cybertron figures have been hard to find around these parts, and I thought for sure I’d have to hunt Grimlock down online, dip into my booze fund, and pay scalper prices. Luckily, I spotted one lone Grimlock on the shelf at my local Target and scooped him up right away. Early production photos of this figure left me a little cold, but I’ve been asking for a Voyager version of Grimmy ever since the disappointing Classics release, so I had to at least give him a chance.

This is the first time I’m seeing the Generations Voyager box and at first I didn’t know what it was. The familiar G1-style grid seems darker than the cards, but I really dig the artwork and the complex die-cut pattern around the window is beaucoup stylish. I am getting weary of the pointless corner cut-outs and it seems even more awkward when it’s on the bottom of the box. None of that matters, though, because I have no room to save these boxes, so I gleefully shredded it to pieces in order to get at my figure. Grimlock is packaged in robot mode, but we’re going to start out with his dino mode.

There’s a lot of good and bad in Grimlock’s T-Rex mode. Let’s start with the good. The sculpting is impressive and the coloring is good. I don’t feel the sense of cheap cuts that Hasbro seems to be making with so many other figures in this line. Grimlock is loaded with panel lining and the red mesh paint apps on the panels scattered around his body really make the figure pop. The grey plastic Hasbro used looks fine, and while I would have preferred something a little more vibrant for the gold, it looks ok. Even Grimlock’s play gimmick is cool. Push the lever on the back of Grimlock’s neck and his mouth opens and his eyes and mouth light up with one of the most powerful LED’s I’ve ever seen in a toy. It’s so much better than the crappy light up effects in the Prime toys. All these things add up to a cool looking alt mode.

Ok, so now for the bad stuff. Grimlock’s dino mode is very hollow. Unless I’m looking at him from the top down, I can’t ignore the cavernous hole in his chest. Next up, his tail is awkwardly proportioned and has zero articulation. Finally, the upper parts of his legs are static, and this has to do with his transformation because they peg into place. You can bend his legs at the knees, but his upper legs stay locked in place, and that’s a big letdown. At least his arms are ball jointed. Any close look at his dino mode makes it clear that Hasbro favored the robot mode over all else. Grimlock probably stays in his alt mode more than almost any other Transformer, so making these kinds of sacrifices on his alt mode are rather suspect.

My biggest complaint with Classics Grimlock was that Hasbro seemed to go out of their way to change his transformation from the original G1 toy and the result was quite alienating. This version returns to the roots of the G1 transformation, but still manages to muck things up a bit. The thing about G1 Grimlock is that he worked great in both robot and dino mode because of his simple and clever transformation. In spite of being a Transformer, he was a great action figure in both modes and that was certainly a rare thing for a TF back in those days. I would argue that you could take the G1 Grimlock design, make just a few tweaks to improve proportions and articulation and come away with a perfect figure. No need to reinvent the wheel here, Hasbro. Fall of Cybertron’s Grimlock comes close, but then strays away by doing things like making the legs peg into place in dino mode and overcomplicating the conversion of the tail into the legs. Still, at least this version doesn’t have a split dino head for feet, because that was never  the Grimlock that I know.

And then there’s the robot mode, and this is where the figure truly shines. He’s perfectly proportioned with a hulking upper body, beefy shoulders and sturdy legs. He hits all the points of his G1 design, with the dino head worn as a backpack and his dino feet claws protruding from his wrists. I do kind of miss the wings he had in the G1 toy, but you can still angle the dino arms up if you want to get something a little closer to that aesthetic. The head sculpt is pure Grimlock with some excellent light piping. He’s replete with panel lines and major machinery detail sculpted into his chest and around his neck. The light up gimmick still works in this mode, this time lighting up his chest.

My other big issue with Classics Grimlock was his size. Grimlock should never be a Deluxe and that problem is certainly solved with this release. Even in the G1 cartoon he was significantly taller than Optimus. This version of Grimlock scales nicely next to my War for Cybertron Prime. Some may say he’s a little too big, but I think he’s just right.

In robot mode, Grimlock features great articulation. His head is ball jointed; his arms rotate at the shoulders and have some lateral movement as well. The elbows are hinged and there are swivels in his biceps and wrists. He legs are ball jointed at the hips, his knees have solid ratchet joints, and there are swivels in his thighs. A waist swivel would have been nice, but what we got is pretty good.

Grimmy comes with two accessories. You get the energon sword and shield he used in the game. Both are extremely nice pieces. I usually prefer guns with my Transformers, but in this case, the accessories fit the character and he looks great holding them. The only downside is that they don’t store anywhere on him. With all that hollow space in his dino chest, you’d think he could have found a way to store his weapons up there.

When all is said and done, me like Fall of Cybertron Grimlock. Grimlock no bozo, Grimlock is king. Sure, there are plenty of things I’d rather Hasbro had done differently and there were sacrifices that I feel didn’t need to be made. Still, the near perfection of his bot mode makes up for a lot of the unfortunate things about his dino mode. Fans of Grimlock haven’t received a whole lot of love from Hasbro over the years, so I think this release should go a long way to scratch that itch. Plus, he never gets tired of me telling him about the petro-rabbits.

Yeah, I bought Vortex last, but I didn’t want to end my look at the Combaticons with such a downer, so I saved Brawl here for the final feature. Not that Brawl is one of the better figures of the team, but he isn’t as terrible as Vortex. He’s solidly average. I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s dive in.

Transformers. Generations. Fall of Cybertron. Packaging. Seen it. Love it. BUILD GIANT ROBOT!!! Brawl is packaged in robot mode, but as usual we’ll start with his alt mode.

Ah, the Cybertronian tank. Make a box and put a turret on the top. It doesn’t even need real treads! It hovers!!! It’s the wet dream of any lazy Transformer designer. Back in the day Cybertronian tanks looked a lot more interesting and bad ass. Just look at Beast Machines Tankor. He’s got style. Brawl, on the other hand, just gets by as being a lime green gun platform. It’s a design so average that it makes War for Cybertron Megatron’s tank mode look like a freaking masterpiece. But at least his alt mode isn’t a ROFLCOPTER like poor Vortex. Brawl’s turret turns and the guns can elevate, which is cool. He also stores his handgun in his turret as a little extra firepower. I’m being hard on Brawl, but truth is his alt mode is Ok for what it is. I guess we’ll cut him some slack because he’s technically a triple changer. Not you, Vortex… you get no slack.

Transforming Brawl into robot mode is easy. If you pick him up and turn him over you can see everything that’s going on. Transforming him into his tank mode looks easy on paper, but in reality it’s kind of a pain in the ass. It’s all about adjusting his arms so that the tabs lock in just right. Like most Transformers, it gets easier the more you do it, but the first couple of times frustrated me, mainly because the payoff isn’t that great.

Brawl’s robot mode redeems him a bit. Again, he’s not spectacular, but he’s a solid enough looking robot. He has a fairly clean, well-proportioned form and some pretty some cool sculpted detail, like the pistons under his chest. He also has a really cool head sculpt, complete with a faceplate. On the downside, his combiner hinge and the back of the tank just hang down past his legs and are a bit of an eyesore. He’s extremely back heavy and his legs are all loosey goosey so he’s tough to stand up. The situation is made worse because his feet don’t lock into place, so there’s no support there either and they’re prone to just folding back up. Try to stand him and he usually just folds like a house of cards. His coloring comes mostly from his green and black plastic with a little grey here and there. I honestly don’t mind his green as much as I thought I would and at least Hasbro remembered to stamp his Decepticon emblem on his chest, unlike Vortex.

Brawl certainly has some issues, but I just find him to be a fun figure to play around with. He has good poseability, and I like to think that in robot mode, he can just hunch forward and lob artillery shells from the cannons on his back. You’ve got to like anyone who can do that! He’s still not a lot of toy for $15 as his engineering is overly simple and he has hardly any heft to him at all. I get it. Oil is expensive, plastic is expensive. But I can’t help but wonder why our Deluxes are getting smaller and simpler at the same time Hasbro is bringing Star Wars to 6-inch scale and introducing a new 2-foot tall Titan Class of Transformer.

Well, that wraps up my look at all of the individual Combaticons. Tomorrow we’ll put this week to bed with a look at Bruticus and see if the toy can be as delightfully badass as the character in the game.

There were a lot of enjoyable levels in Fall of Cybertron, but surprisingly, Vortex’s were among my favorites. The big open area and the ability to strafe Autobots, transform into robot, beat the hell out of them, and then transform back into helicopter and fly off was really damn cool. I replayed his parts more than any others and all the time I had a big smile on my face while thinking, “Damn, it’s good to be a Decepticon!” It’s pretty sad and ironic that such a fun character in the game wound up with the worst of all the Combaticon figures. There’s no way to sugar coat this, so let me take a couple of belts of Jameson and then we’ll dive right in.

There’s the Generations packaging. Amazingly, it still looks good while holding such a shitty figure. Vortex is probably the best use of the BUILD GIANT ROBOT sticker, because when I saw him hanging on the peg, I wanted to leave him there, but then I realized that if I didn’t buy him, I couldn’t BUILD GIANT ROBOT! I’ve come this far, what’s another fifteen bucks to see what Bruticus is all about, right? Combiners are the C&Cs and BAFs of the Transformers Universe. It makes you buy figures you don’t really want. I don’t have a lot more to say about the package, other than it looks like Hasbro tried to tone down his awful colors for the character art, but that’s like toning down an exploding sun and it doesn’t help when the actual figure can be seen right below it. Let’s start with his helicopter mode.

Vortex is a helicopter in the most abstract of senses. He’s a big angular mess with rotor blades on top and some landing skids. He kind of looks like a crude polygon model of a helicopter from an early PlayStation game. If helicopters had mothers, this helicopter’s mom would have drowned it in the tub. It’s possible that the concept of a Cybertronian helicopter just doesn’t work that well, but it doesn’t change how awful this mode is in execution. And then there are the colors. What the hell were you thinking here, Hasbro? Vortex looks like he’s made to represent the worst, most obnoxious deco that Generation 2 had to offer. Which is crazy, because there is an actual Generation 2 version of this figure and it looks subdued and rational by comparison. The horrible combination of that purple and red coupled with the piercing yellow on his swords makes my eyes bleed hot tears of burning agony. Maybe Vortex’s robot mode can save this figure…

Ah, nope. While not nearly the atrocity that his alt mode is, Vortex’s robot mode is decidedly average. The proportions are ok but his arm articulation is awkward and I don’t like the way his head just hovers a bit above his chest. He also feels unbelievable cheap and hollow and nothing like a $15 toy should feel. Seriously, there’s just something about his complete lack of heft that sets him apart from the other Combaticons and makes him feel like a knock off. It probably doesn’t help that he’s missing his Decepticon emblem on his chest. There’s a space in the mold where it was supposed to go and it’s pictured on photos of the toy on the cardback, but either my Vortex missed out or Hasbro decided it wasn’t cost effective to stamp a tiny emblem on a $15 toy that feels cheap and small to begin with. Sheesh! The colors in robot mode are a tiny bit more palatable, but only because he shows more purple and a little less of that terrible and obnoxious red.

Vortex comes with a pair of swords that are every bit as obnoxiously colored as he is. Someone at Hasbro clearly said, “the colors… not obnoxious enough… make the swords blinding, neon yellow!” The swords can clip onto Vortex’s skids in his helicopter mode or he can wield them in his hands.

It seriously pains me to hate on any Transformer, but I can’t help it here. Vortex is poop. Just about every aspect of this figure offers me something to dislike. If you’re a fan of the trippy neon colors of the G2 era, than maybe you’ll find the deco to your liking, but even if that’s the case the rest of the figure is still garbage. And as much as I dislike the engineering and the deco, it’s the fact that this figure feels so cheap that I’d expect to find it hanging in a Family Dollar store on a generic card that said SUPER CHANGING ROBOT HELICOPTER or some other nonsense. The Fall of Cybertron toys have been fairly solid thus far, but when Hasbro releases crap like this figure and charges $15 for it, they are further sullying their reputation. At this point, Hasbro, you’re driving collectors into the arms of the Fansprojects, Perfect Effects, and TFC’s out there. I’d much rather spend $60 on a better looking, better quality, better engineered, deluxe sized figure from one of them, than $15 a piece of crap like this.

It took me a while, but my Xbox is up and running again and I was finally able to play through Fall of Cybertron. And play through it again, and one more time. Needless to say I enjoyed the hell out of it, and it’s given me a new motivation to track down some of the remaining figures. Yeah, Jazz’s figure left me cold and he made my naughty list for 2012, but the three Combaticons I’ve featured so far more than made up for him. Let’s see if some remolding and fresh paint can make the Jazz mold better the second time around.