Bot Reviews: Transformers: Collaborative Twin Mill and Bone Shaker

Have you heard about Hot Wheels? Apparently, they’re leadin’ the way. I don’t remember the tiny little cars as being something I was specifically a fan of as a kid, but, like, it didn’t matter, because I still had a bunch. Every kid had a bunch. If you lived in a house with kids long enough, I think they just spawned into existence, like mushrooms.

As an adult, sometimes Hot Wheels make me wonder if I got into the wrong hobby, because you can still, in 2026, get most normal cars for under 2 Canadian dollars. I only know a tiny bit about the toyline, just enough to know that it’s a deep abyss, with a ton of interesting real-life lore behind it, both when it comes to the real cars that the line makes models of, and the “fantasy castings” that occupy just as much of their offerings. But, see, the problem is that the cars themselves don’t do it for me. I impulse-bought a blue and gold deco of Bone Shaker for the sake of this review, popped it out of the package, rolled it around, and went “that sure is a car.”

I guess I need my merchandise to be of actual characters, instead of just vehicles? And not whatever those “character cars” Hot Wheels makes are. Or, at least, if they must be vehicles, they need to be vehicles from media that I like, such as the Transformers Hot Wheels that they’ve been making. By the way, I have never once seen any of those in the wild, just at toy shows for more than 2 dollars, which feels extremely besides the point.

Speaking of that, onto today’s subject: The first wave of the other half of the Hot Wheels and Transformers collaboration, where Hasbro takes the designs of certain “fantasy casting” Hot Wheels cars, and blows them up into standard Deluxe-class carformers. The first two are Twin Mill, and Bone Shaker, who are each simply named after the cars they transform into, which actually works well as a pair of Transformer names. This was another set of figures I wasn’t initially going to go in on, since a) I have no institutional knowledge of Hot Wheels, and b) these are personality-less characters with no fiction, but the fandom itself kept hyping them up, so, eventually, I bit. 

I’m coming into this a bit late, Wave 2 of this little toyline’s already on shelves at my local haunts, but I still see Wave 1 at the back of the pegs in several places, so I’m going to claim that I’m not *completely* out of date. It does mean, however, that I’m going to try to tackle both Wave 1-ers at once, something I’ve never done for full-sized figures before, so wish me luck! Oh, and speaking of my local haunts, EB Games is hideously overcharging for these guys, whereas Wal-Mart has them at more normal prices, so, get them at Wally World, I guess.

Vehicle Modes:

That’s right, these two come packaged in their alternate modes, like, in my opinion, all Transformers should. And it makes sense, because those altmodes were definitely a priority. And man, they’re gorgeous.

So, Twin Mill was apparently the very first non-real-life vehicle that Hot Wheels ever made, dating all the way back to 1969. And that’s appropriate, because it looks like one of those weird concept vehicles you’d see in images from that time period, the kind of test-car people were using to break land-speed records. The whole thing is curved and sleek, shaped sort of like a shoe, has big pipes on the sides, and an improbable two engines in front, hence the name. Would that even work on an actual car? Who knows!

I’m curious about how the driver would even get into this, without any visible doors. I imagine it’s a snug fit, considering that the car’s surprisingly small, though, almost the size of one of the Deluxe Minibots, like Legacy Gears or Netflix Bumblebee.

And, while there’s obviously some transformation seams, the whole car’s very clean-looking, as you’d expect. Honestly, the altmode reminds me of some kind of lost Transformers: Cybertron era character, albeit someone with his Minicon Hardpoints and/or Cyber Planet Key slot removed. 

Twin Mill was smaller than you’d expect, but Bone Shaker’s larger, taking up a decently wide footprint for a Deluxe.

It’s appropriate, because Bone Shaker seems built to look cool, instead of being built for speed.

She’s an old-fashioned, Ford-Model-T-Looking Hot Rod, with a great big skull up front, an exposed engine, giant pipes on the sides, and odd techie stuff in the back. It’s audacious, and loud, and reminds me of the Generation 2 Laser Rods. There’s a lot of cool small details here, like how there’s skeletal hands grabbing the headlights….

…and how the open driver’s compartment includes sculpted seats and a steering wheel.

Plus, there are far fewer transformation seams. As I mentioned, I picked up a repainted Bone Shaker to compare with this larger replica, and it’s actually not a 1:1 copy of the design.

All the stuff is there, but the proportions of the car were adjusted from the little one, to shrink down a bunch of the components, and look more “realistic.” Also, my Hot Wheels one has a closed roof, but apparently open-roofed versions exist. 

For colors, Twin Mill isn’t based on the flat blue of the original release, but rather, a later repaint from 2018 or so (they kept this car in circulation for like 50 years!!! Imagine if Transformers did that!). The car’s got deep blue as its base color, with a sleek pattern of light blue and gray stripes painted on it, as well as small hits of yellow, red, and silver. Translucent plastic is used to great effect here, to give him a clear windshield, and clear headlights (speaking of the windshield, while the details beneath it are indistinct, they manage to not just be Robot Bits.) There’s a little Autobrand next to his wheels (which are black, with painted silver rims), and a “Hot Wheels” logo at the rear, which I kinda wish they didn’t include, since it makes little in-universe sense, but ehh.

The point is, he’s really complete-feeling, and even includes bonuses like painted head and taillights (well, the ones that aren’t clear).

Bone Shaker’s got a similarly lush deco, another one based on later repaints of the car. She has that good old fashioned “black with flames” colorscheme, with the flames being bright yellow, with red striping. She’s also got a lot of nice silver paint to pick out details (like the skull upfront, the pipes, and the tire rims), as well as other bits of yellow and red, and brown on the car seats. There’s no Autobrand on her (it’s on her accessory, more on that later), but the Hot Wheels logo’s right upfront on the hood. Again, there’s enough bonuses here (like painted taillights, again) to make the whole colorscheme feel lush.

For build quality, the nicest thing about both of these cars is that they feel like proper, modern Age of the Primes-era Deluxes. That sounds like faint praise, but Collaboratives have been all over the place when it comes to materials and build quality, and the last couple Deluxe-scale ones I handled (Wingtail and Blue Booster) felt like older, less-good Prime Wars-era Deluxes. So these two having the kind of solidity of modern figures feels really great. They’re both very solidly built, and Twin Mill’s clear plastic doesn’t feel like a problem. Well, Bone Shaker has a teeny tiny issue:

The thin plastic bar behind her seats that forms the chassis likes to split in half (it does so for transformation), but that’s barely a problem.

For features, firstly, both cars roll really well. That’s definitely a stipulation Mattel had. For other features, Twin Mill’s got a surprising amount of stuff going on.

Firstly, he comes with a pair of blast effects, a couple of long golden flames, cast in rigid plastic, like most modern Blast Effects are. They’re a little too small to be 5-millimeter compatible, but are designed to fit onto his side-mounted exhaust pipes. A nifty thing about how they’re designed is that they’re sculpted with a slight bend in them, so each effect wraps around the car’s body and rear tires, staying out of the way.

The other set of features is that those exhaust pipes, and the intakes at the top of both engines, are all removable, and actually are on 5-millimeter pegs, exposing four ports, perfect for weaponization, something I wasn’t expecting.

Comparatively speaking, Bone Shaker’s threadbare on the features, not that she really needed any. She’s got a lone accessory, really moreso meant for robot mode: A big gray stick shift, with a red handle on top, with an Autobrand inside crossbones.

You can slot it into a bespoke, rectangular port inside her driver’s compartment, though it’s very silly-looking, due to how massively large it is, so I usually just leave it off.

Transformations: 

These are great transformations, man. The thing I like about both of them is that they’re a bit unusual, they’re not just doing the same kind of G1-derived carformer transformations we’ve always seen, but they still manage to be intuitive and fun, amongst all the flipping and rotating. 

Twin Mill’s actually a bit of a partsformer. You slide his engine block, and part of the car, up and out into two pieces, transform the full figure, then re-attach it to his forearms at the end.

Another little bit of his transformation that I like is the clever way his arms unfold out of his split hood-pieces.

Bone Shaker’s got less for me to say about her transformation, beyond “it’s good,” and the fact that she sort of has a Dramatic Head Reveal, when you flip her hood down into its robot mode position. 

Robot Modes:

I like characters, not cars, and despite being original creations, with no stories, or even bio notes, to their name, both of these bots ooze personality, which goes a long way.

First off, Twin Mill. You know he’s a speedster because he’s all skinny limbs, and long legs.

Despite such a small altmode, he expands upwards into a normally-sized robot mode. Of course, the price of that is that his lower legs are extremely, visibly hollow, in an ugly way, but at least we know it’s because they had to cram a ton of robot in there, not because of budget cuts.

Twin Mill’s got a lot of design hallmarks that make him feel a bit reminiscent of other carformers, like a car roof on his chest, and shoulderpads made out of car hood, like Pointblank, or Counterpunch, but still manages to have a feel all to his own. Again, the “lost Unicron Trilogy character” vibes are very strong.

Uptop, he’s got a great headsculpt, a helmet with a Tracks-like crest, with tiny exhaust pipes sticking out of the back, and a visor over the eyes of a stern-looking face. He’s a speedster, I think, but unlike Blurr, or Side Burn, or so many of the kid-appeal characters, I think he takes his job very seriously, maybe with a bit of arrogance. 

Bone Shaker’s got a completely different shape, between her big, stompy boots, Skull-face-chest, and car-wheel-shoulderpads. She’s not as clean of a robot as Twin Mill, her feet are visibly made of cobbled-together parts, and her backpack of hood and pipes is a bit awkward.

One actual flaw is her arms, which sit oddly low on her torso, and come off as kind of undersized. It’s funny, because her arms are actually bigger than Twin Mill’s, it’s just a matter of proportions.

That said, she makes up for it in just projecting a sense of loud meanness. The messiness feels like the point. Same goes for her headsculpt, which include a mouthplate, a visor, and antenna made of three exhaust pipes each.

Whoever she is, she’s definitely loud and abrasive. 

The colors on both bots are, again, very lush and complete-feeling. Twin Mill’s deco includes all of the same hues, and the light blue and silver have been liberally applied to his newly-exposed robot parts, picking out vents and other tech detailing. I like his little yellow visor, too. In fact, his colors feel so complete, that they added a bit lof light blue to some panels on his back, and usually, the back of the robot is free parking to leave uncolored. 

Bone Shaker, meanwhile, adds a bunch of orange to her colorscheme, on her arms and pelvis, plus a tiny bit of warm gray, over the same silver and black. Some of my “this is a loud, ascerbic person” impressions are definitely due to how striking her bright red visor is. 

Build quality on Bone Shaker is excellent, with tight joints, and no trouble standing. Twin Mill’s a little more dodgy. A couple weeks after opening him, his knees have become a bit loose. He can still stand fine, but it doesn’t feel as good as it ought to. 

At the same time, his snap-on forearm weapons are a bit of a problem, in that they don’t really snap on, and fall off way too easily. I lost count of how many times they came off during this photo shoot. 

For articulation, though, Twin Mill’s got the full post-Siege suite. Bottom-to-top, we’ve got ankle tilts, swivel knees, thigh swivels, universal hips, a swivel waist, and a ball-jointed neck, with a bit of look-up-and-down motion.

The arms have universal joints where the shoulderpads meet the torso, and then bicep swivels and elbow swivels where the arms start, in addition to wrist swivels. Plus, if you take his engine block parts off, there’s a weird second elbow joint, mostly used for transformation. He’s just bendy enough to cut some good speedster poses.

Bone Shaker’s got a similar suite of joints. Her ankle tilts are funny, because only the back chunk of her boots tilts inwards, with the front half staying sideways.

She’s mostly got the same jointage, though, going up: Swivel knees, universal hips, a waist swivel, a ball-jointed neck with even better up-and-down motion, and arms with universal shoulders, bicep swivels, and elbow swivels. One big missing thing, though, is a wrist swivel. She’s got a melee weapon, those work so much better when a figure has wrist swivels. On the upside, her shoulderpads have some jointage where they meet her torso, to make sure they stay out of the way when posing her.

For accessories and features, Twin Mill’s still got all the stuff from his alternate mode, literally snapped onto his forearms. His exhaust pipes are now underslung blasters, to which you can attach those blast effect parts. I like to pretend they make swords.

You can also pop the pipes off, same with the engine intakes, and he can hold any of them in his hands, though you need to remove the engine block bits from his forearms to make room.

But if you leave those bits on, you get four 5-millimeter ports to weaponize up, which is fun.

Again, Bone Shaker’s got fewer features, just her lone accessory, but in this mode, she can hold it as a beatin’ stick, which I love for her, even if a wrist swivel would have made things so much better.

By the way, I fully consider her a Decepticon, mostly because of her appearance, and because this toyline officially has no villains. The Autobrand on her weapon? That symbol’s there to represent who the stick is being used on, like when Beast Wars Scorponok had Maximal symbols on his missiles. 

Overall:

These are a couple of good, solid, well-made Deluxe Carformers. It’s got nothing to do with the Hot Wheels branding, they’re just good on their own merits. They’ve got great car modes, fun transformations, and tons of personality in their robot modes. It really feels like extra effort went into them, too, between what feels like extra deco, and the sense of style injected into the robot modes. I feel like the designers were cutting loose a bit here, getting the chance to design original characters, instead of updates of legacy characters. Which is good, because I think each of this pair cost a bit more than normal Deluxes (it’s strange times right now, prices are fluctuating). If they do, they’re worth a couple extra bucks, I’d say. Sure, they’re non-media characters, but they’ve got so much personality, I don’t really care.

I feel bad for Twin Mill, though. On an engineering level, he’s kind of the better figure in the set. He’s got more going on, and fewer issues, despite his loose knees and pop-off accessories. Bone Shaker runs circles around him, though, stumpy arms and all, based entirely on vibes. It’s almost sad how it’s not even a contest. So, obviously, Bone Shaker’s the one to get out of this first wave if you’re going to get one. But don’t sleep on Twin Mill! He’s really good, too. As for what’s coming up in this line, Twin Mill’s got a red repaint (which is still just called Twin Mill) that’s Target-only in the US, and Gamestop-only over here, but is bizarrely expensive (like 45 Canadian!), so I think I’m skipping that one. The second wave, meanwhile, has hit Wal-Mart shelves, and it’s funny, because this pair of bots (GT Scorcher and El Segundo Coupe) are very much following Twin Mill’s lead of “normal car, normal robot,” rather than Bone Shaker’s deal, so I guess she gets to remain the unique one amongst the squares, which feels very appropriate. 

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