Bot Reviews: Transformers: Kingdom Commander Rodimus Prime

Rodimus Prime doesn’t get enough respect. When we think of the character, we mostly think of Hot Rod, the youngster full of vim and vigor, destined for big things, as seen in the original movie.

But after the hero finished their story, saved the day, and got an upgrade, there was a planet and people to lead. The post-movie third season of the original cartoon was ambitious in many ways, and Rodimus Prime being an overwhelmed, put-upon, sullen, self-doubting leader was just one of them.

But kids of the 80’s didn’t seem to like Optimus’s less-than-perfect replacement, the Matrix was handed back to the old Prime before the season was up, and we’ve been paying for it for 40 years, with Rodimus Prime barely showing up in anything, ever, compared to Hot Rod. But this more realistic leader hits differently when you’re a young adult in 2021, and that’s just one reason why I’m glad Rodimus Prime’s finally getting their due.

On the merchandise side of things, the character also sort of got the shaft, in favor of Hot Rod. There was the original G1 figure, and then a Titanium figure in the late 2000s, but outside of that, the other two Rodimus Primes we’ve gotten (a Masterpiece and a Power of the Primes figure) were both Hot Rods that could evolve into Rodimus Prime, bringing to mind the Movie’s upbeat ending, rather than the more challenging story and character that actually followed.

So I’m really glad Rodimus Prime finally got a modern, mainline solo figure. And I’m just astounded they got this red-carpet rollout as a Commander, of all things. I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time. See, Commander is a newish price point, bigger than a Leader, but not a Titan, previously filled by Siege Jetfire and Earthrise Sky Lynx. And so, Rodimus Prime is a big ticket ($120 Canadian!), which is especially challenging considering they’re a smaller figure with a bigger trailer, like Earthrise Optimus (who was a Leader, reviewed here). So, let’s have a look, and see what an expensive Rodimus Prime gets you. I’ll say one thing: There is a LOT of stuff in this box, making the order of the review a bit hard to decide on. Expect a lot of “we’ll talk about that later.”

Effect parts

Since every mode uses these, let’s start with them. So, Rodimus comes packaged with an entire arsenal’s worth of effect parts, all in a little bag. They’re mostly clear blue, and flexibly rubberized. Apparently, most of them are repainted from Siege Omega Supreme.

Here’s what you get: Three identical flame-like pieces, each with an adapter at the end that can fit into either War for Cybertron ports, or smaller effect-part nubs. One of these three flames can go at the very top of a taller, Christmas Tree-like blast, which is, itself, composed of five separate, detachable pieces that turn into blasts of various spreads.

I don’t think the second-to-last one was supposed to come off, though, there’s glue-like flash where it fits in, and it doesn’t have the same kind of peg. Oh, well. Next up, there’s two solid-black smoke effects, made of a rigid, less flexible plastic. Appropriate, because they’re a lot less useful, with only smaller pegs to fit them into things. Lastly, there’s a hard blue plastic starburst-like effect, meant to be used with Rodimus’s Matrix, and it’s a different tooling than the one that came with Studio Series 86 Hot Rod. This many effect parts definitely feels like an attempt to add as much value to the set as possible, and I dig it, simply because I can start passing these around and giving them to other War for Cybertron figures.

I missed the boat on ordering Tricranius (an exclusive Triceratops-former who specifically comes with a big set of effect parts to give out), and this makes me not regret that.

Car Mode

The original Rodimus Prime didn’t have a separate car mode, only a combined-with-the-trailer form. The Masterpiece and Power of the Primes ones sort of did, but they were both specifically Hot Rod’s car mode, meant for the un-evolved robot modes of both. So, giving Rodimus Prime their own dedicated car mode’s an original, if obvious idea.

This is a big, beefy vehicle. It doesn’t just read as a Bigger Hot Rod, this is a different kind of car, less about speed and more about power. It has all kinds of subtly different details like the vents above the cockpit, the cockpit itself being a wider, dome-ier thing, smaller headlights, a much bigger spoiler covered in tech greebling, plus no engine block up front (a feature the G1 figure does share).

It’s a bit less sleek, a bit more bulky, but in a good way, and that translates into how it feels in your hands, really solid and chunky. There’s substance here. It’s almost like a Cyber Battalion Hot Rod that doesn’t exist. My only criticism with the sculpt is the tiny, obvious hole in the windshield, used for the transformation.

For colors, this car’s mostly cast in a show-accurate deep red, with bits of orange and yellow, and a clear blue cockpit. Basically, it’s the same set of colors as Studio Series 86 Hot Rod, complete with the flames and Autobrand upfront, but darker shades, and with a much higher, Commander-level paint budget.

You’ll see many “extras” on this deco, including a black outline around the flames on the hood, and a spoiler that includes the proper orange stripe down the middle. Speaking of that, the spoiler is entirely painted yellow and orange, instead of being cast in yellow (it’s clear blue under the paint), but this comes with some missing paint and general mess around the peg holes on top of it, though it’s not something my eyes are drawn to a lot.

What I do find odd is that the car’s wheels are unpainted black, seeing as they had an infinite paint budget for everything else, and Hot Rod’s front rims were painted.

There’s no real gimmicks in this mode, but the car rolls nicely. I do kind of wish the cockpit opened up, though. The only other feature here is the ability to stash accessories. The robot form’s folded-up gun can peg onto the sides of the car, and the sword can fit onto special tabs beneath the car (I’ll talk about these parts later). There’s also five accessible War for Cybertron Weapons Ports for arming it up….

…and you can always peg those exhaust-fume parts on the end of the car’s pipes.

This car’s mostly concerned with being a big slab on wheels. And speaking of big slabs…

Combined with Trailer

Rodimus’s trailer actually comes folded open in the box, and you’ve got to close it up first. In fact, snapping it shut that first time actually made a plastic crunch loud enough to startle me. You then slot the car into the font of the trailer, and it snaps in using a spring-loaded tab. I’ve heard concerns about that tab scraping the paint off the spoiler, but I’ve got no issues so far that weren’t already there.

The result is a freaking massive vehicle. It’s huge, it’s solid, and it’s got a ridiculous amount of presence. This is a pure plastic chunk, made of solid blocks of material.

Handling it feels like handling a big G1 toy, but in a good way, in that old-fashioned way where G1 toys could just be big, unbroken slabs of plastic, and this leans into it in a way they clearly needed the Commander budget to do. It’s bigger than Earthrise Optimus, weighty, and gives the impression of size, but what I like most is that it doesn’t feel too big, in that it can still fit on my desk.

So, people have been making fun of this strange vehicle since the 80s, referring to it as a Space Winnebago, and with good reason, because, well, that’s what it looks like. You either dig it or you don’t (I dig it).

It’s got a very retro-future, almost Jetsons-like look to it, too, with its funky angles and big, curving pipes. It does feel like the car out front sticks out a bit too far, but I’ve gotten used to it pretty fast. What I didn’t get used to was those pipes, and how they’re supposed to be one fluid set extending from the car to the top of the trailer, but are broken up in a bunch of places.

Like the car, the trailer is very well-colored, and well painted, in multiple shades of deep red, sunset orange, and bright yellow, and includes huge flame deco down the sides (outlined again!) along with those silver pipes, and another Autobrand uptop. Those wheels still aren’t painted, though, despite the rest of the vehicle overflowing with apps.

Onto features! The whole thing still rolls well, even if the middle wheels don’t always touch the ground. The very back of the trailer has a two-part opening door with a ramp, and that first stage of the door actually has little metal pistons that move as you open it. Sadly, that outer door doesn’t stay totally flush when closed on my copy, though this seems to be limited to me, and it doesn’t distract too much. On the upside, the inner ramp has the special connection point on the end used by Earthrise Battle Masters, and other mainline figures, to build roads and bases, a nice little bonus.

And once opened, while it doesn’t seem like it at first, the trailer’s interior is roomy enough to roll most modern Deluxe-sized cars into.

An odd little feature is that there’s a little opening door at the top-front of the trailer, with a little compartment you can stash things into.

But even cooler, there’s an actual sliding drawer at the bottom-back of the trailer, with dedicated slots to stash the exhaust effects and Matrix glow part in, and other small things, though it’s a tight fit.

Speaking of effect parts, I count 11 external War for Cybertron ports on the trailer for arming up, with the instructions recommending placing two of the smaller blue effect parts on ones beneath the back door, and the smog effects on the ends of the larger pipes.

The instructions also say to place Rodimus’s gun turret on the top of the trailer’s exterior, so I guess it’s time to talk about that!

The original G1 Rodimus Prime figure had this turret as a permanent part of its base, but, like Earthrise Optimus, this version is removable.

Unlike Earthrise Optimus, a weirdly high amount of effort went into it, and it puts that trailer-crab to shame.

When fully extended, this turret is huge, about as tall as a modern Deluxe.

It’s mostly black, with a silver fade on the guns, and a few grey parts. While it can’t actually roll, there’s sculpted treads on the base. It’s got a fair amount of articulation, including a ratcheted base, and a “neck” that’s got both up-and-down and side-to-side motion, on top of fold-out blast shields on the sides, and twisting handholds. Basically, it’s incredibly huge and robust for what it is.

As I mentioned, the instructions say to peg it on top of the trailer for storage (with a flip-out peg on the bottom to secure it, along with a flip-out “kickstand” on the neck to keep it supported), but you can crack the trailer open and stash it inside, to make it more G1 accurate (though there’s no longer room for a car). Some people have had issues with the trailer staying closed while the turret is inside, but I’ve read an easy little fix where you make sure the panels on the turret are pointing up, so there’s room to close it. If that doesn’t work, I sometimes leave it unpegged from the inside, and make sure it’s pushed back as far as it’ll go on the interior, with a little tab on the end of it being pushed into a little slot behind the roof storage compartment.

Really, the biggest criticism I have about this mode is that there’s no real good all-in-one storage configuration for all of the accessories. You can clip a few blast effects into that lower drawer, and maybe cram a couple more into it, and fit some into the compartment uptop, but there isn’t space for all of them. There also isn’t room for anything else in the trailer when the turret is in there, unless you loosely cram a few effects at the back between the doors and the turret. The robot-mode gun, similarly, doesn’t really stash anywhere unless you peg it into a weapons port, or hang it off the side of the car (there’s no good internal storage with the turret inside). So, inevitably, you’re going to have a few loose parts to stick in a bag.

Transformation

It’s interesting comparing this transformation to Studio Series 86 Hot Rod, because the steps are broadly similar, complete with that same Quintesson Lake Transformation arm-ligature-twist. On the other hand, the larger size and increased partscount has given the designers space to get a bit more complicated with it, which has its ups and downs.

On the upside, there’s a lot more room to do things, so you don’t have parts bumping into each other, the chest isn’t a fake car-hood, and that issue Hot Rod had with the car headlights not wanting to sit flush against their shoulders is totally absent. Plus, there’s this neat little step they did seemingly just to flex their budget, where the wheels on Rodimus’s shoulders open up, and compress into their arms a bit.

On the downside, a lot of steps feel like they’ve been added just for the sake of complication, and it’s oddly particular about the order you do things in (my second time, without instructions, I had to keep undoing steps because I’d gotten ahead of myself, and something else was blocked). Still, I had it memorize by try 3, so it’s intuitive enough.

Those shins are a problem, though. Like Hot Rod, the wheels and back section of the car fold away into them. Unlike Hot Rod, it’s really hard to figure out what to do. Basically, you fold the black panels at the backs of the shins fully outwards (the instructions don’t show how far out they can actually go), compress the wheels down a little bit, and then fold the parts the wheels are on inwards, squeezing them past the outsides of the shins.

The problem is that doing this involves bending and flexing solid plastic as you squeeze the wheels into place, in a way that doesn’t feel great for long-term durability, and it’s all been done seemingly so the back of the boots can be fully black in robot mode.

Robot Mode

This big old Commander changes into a Voyager-scale figure, the exact same height as Earthrise Optimus Prime, but this one’s got the spoiler on the back.

Details-wise, it’s pretty much the same broad strokes as Studio Series 86 Hot Rod, just larger, and with a lot more sculped-in tech detailing.

To be fair, this is basically what Rodimus looked like on the show, minus that extra detailing on the spoiler, pelvis, arms, shins, and other areas. Still, it adds some much-appreciated visual interests, though I wish Rod’s chest didn’t now have peg holes on it from the transformation. Still, it’s a sleek-looking package, and the proportions have been subtly adjusted to make them look a bit less svelte, and a bit more beefed up.

That headsculpt is a point of contention to some, and that included me at first glance. See, G1 cartoon Rodimus Prime’s face was basically just Hot Rod with a couple of extra lines added to suggest age.

This headsculpt takes it in a different direction, and turns Hot Rod into a haggard, worn-down looking warrior. It’s grown on me, though, especially in person. It helps that this isn’t a Studio Series figure, so the mission statement about accuracy is arguably less important. It also helps that it’s a good, characterful headsculpt that communicates a real sense of who they are and what their default emotional state tended to be.

Like the alternate mode, there’s still a lot of paint here, and they’re still flexing their budget with all the little extras. The colors have a bit more visible black now, thanks to the boots, but are still the same basic “Hot Rod but a bit darker” shades. I appreciate that all three shades of red/yellow/orange are now present at Rod’s wrists, something the Studio Series 86 one couldn’t budget in.

The face is now a nice shade of silver (which, customizers have proven, makes it look even older) and that trick on Hot Rod where slightly varying shades of red are used for barely-visible accents on the body is still present, particularly on the head and pelvis. And of course, the chest still looks nice, and I still wish those wheel rims were painted.

When being handled, Rodimus Prime’s robot mode feels way more fiddly than the rest of the package, though not too much so. It’s because it contrasts with the solid brick of plastic that was the alternate mode, and it still comes with solid, weighty feelings, only now there’s a lot of little joints and panels to manipulate. The only bit of actual instability here is the backpack, which likes to unplug from the windshield just a little too easily for my tastes.

Speaking of little joints, like the 86-er, there’s tons of articulation on display here, but moreso. So, we’ve got all the expected things here (ankles, knees, hips, waist, wrists, elbows, shoulders, head, limb swivels), but with enough plusses, like double-knees, a double-jointed neck, and a mid-elbow swivel, to make the whole package just a bit more bendier than standard-issue Voyagers. And as for pricepoint-motivated bonuses, on top of the joints with extra range, we have some really expressive hands, thanks to two joints in each pointer figure, and a mitten-type knuckle joint for the other fingers.

On top of that, they’ve enhanced the shoulder articulation with an extra joint so Rodimus can finally do the “this fish was thiiiiis big” outwards shoulder motion….though it’s not a very big fish, since their shoulder pylons bump against their body after too long. Still, it all comes together really well, and makes the figure feel almost like one of the smaller Masterpiece cars.

For features, first of all, the chest opens downwards, to reveal a silver-painted Matrix compartment, and a now-familiar Matrix of Leadership.

Oddly, despite appearances, it’s a new tooling compared to Earthrise Optimus and Studio Series 86 Hot Rod, in that it’s got a smaller peghole in the back.

It’s still nicely-painted in gold and silver over a blue crystal, though, and that starburst-looking effect part can clip into it, using the gaps in the handles, for a Unicron-destroying blast.

As for Matrix Holdability, Rodimus can grab it with both hands thanks to those articulated fingers, though thanks to how big those hands are, it has to awkwardly dangle off the pointer fingers.

For other accessories, we have an odd choice for the character: A sword.

It’s actually the Sword of Primus, from the recent Transformers: Regeneration One comic, a sequel to the old Marvel run. I believe Hot Rod found and used it in that comic, but not Rodimus Prime (I haven’t read it, though). It’s a strangely obscure pull, but in hand, it suits the character well, and looks good when used in a nice pose. It’s a silver blade, with an interestingly ornate sculpt that has a lot of little lines etched into it, like the stereotypical fantasy elf sword. It’s got a black handle and a little flip-out War for Cybertron-compatible peg at the base of the blade, too. You’d think the Matrix could fit into that peg, but this new tooling can’t, thanks to that smaller peghole. However, if you grab Optimus’s copy, you can peg it onto the base of the blade, like the Star Saber (in modern fiction, the Matrix usually forms the base of that blade).

More importantly, that peg means you can stash the sword on Rod’s back.

And, for when a sword won’t do, Rodimus comes with a big, two-handled laser rifle, cast in black that folds in half when stored.

It’s a bit awkwardly long, though and equally awkward if you try and have them hold it two-handed, but it looks cool.

Across Rodimus Prime’s body, there’s a total of seven War for Cybertron ports for arming up, but more importantly, there’s a couple of undocumented features that I’ve found out about.

Firstly, the holes on Rodimus’s spoiler have dedicated pegs on that gun turret, so you can plug it in as a back-mounted cannon. It makes the figure a little back-heavy, but looks impressive when you pull it off. The swivelling turret head goes a long way here.

Lastly, and most amusingly, Rodimus’s pointer fingers are exactly the right thickness to peg into those blast effect parts, meaning you can do Dragonball Z-esque finger-blasts.

It’s incredibly fun.

The solid black effect parts are a bit too narrow to fit, but the blue ones all work nicely.

Battle Base

The trailer actually comes mostly changed into this mode already, and getting it back is pretty simple. Crack that sucker open, flip down the front, plug the turret in, and voila, you have a rolling weapons platform. Rodimus stands on it, and grips the turret.

It’s G1-toy-accurate, and audaciously silly-looking, especially since it’s where a bunch of the money went. It’s impressively huge, for sure, though I wish it was painted more, since the interior is just plain red, grey, and orange plastic colors. On the other hand, this lack of deco may be to make room for the 36 (36!!! I counted!) War for Cybertron ports on the sides and the ramp. Clearly, this is meant to be a base for you to build on using whatever weapons and other accessories you have.

The downside is that these ports stick out on the edges, meaning it’s hard to get figures to stand anywhere but the central ramp, unless they’ve got conveniently-spaced pegholes on their feet.

The other downsides that I see are that there’s no real way to make a good stand-up repair-bay mode, like Optimus’s trailer (both sides don’t stand up very well), and the ramp up front kind of awkwardly dangles off the folded-down back door, with no way to touch the ground and roll vehicles out of, unless you add an Earthrise ramp-bot to the connector at the end (and even then, it’s a steep drop). All that being said, this 100 percent outdoes Earthrise Optimus Prime’s trailer in terms of size, visual interest, and features.

And, for another fun undocumented feature, I discovered that you can flip up the storage compartment at the back, and turn it into a chair for Rodimus to chill out on. Rodimus really needs a break.

Overall

It’s just so odd (in a good way) that they even made this figure in this size class. You’d think Optimus would have gotten this Commander-class treatment instead, with Rodimus Prime being consigned to a safer, smaller pricepoint. Not that I’m complaining, when it’s one of my favorite characters, and one that’s often overlooked. It’s almost overwhelming how much stuff is in this box, and how many things you can do with it all. It all feels a bit like a mad attempt to justify the high price point, though, via throwing everything and the kitchen sink in here.

Still, superior paint, engineering and poseability of the main figure is much more lush than a normal Voyager, the same way Studio Series 86 Hot Rod was definitely more lush than a Deluxe. The trailer is an impressively huge slab of a toy with a lot of ideas, but also somewhat plain in practice. That, the badly-designed shin transformation with its need to strain plastic, and the fact that they didn’t paint the wheel rims (I know it’s petty, but it’s really noticeable when everything else is tricked out to the nines) are the only real flaws here.

Bottom line, I really like this figure, and it’s a fun pile of stuff to fiddle with. I keep picking up and transforming it, and then messing around with the effect parts and weapons ports, to figure out new configurations for it all. Certainly, if you’ve got a LEGO-style construction toy mindset, there’s a lot of potential here, especially with all the ports on the base. But I admit it’s a steep price tag, no matter how you look at it. Still, if you can justify that price, there’s a lot here to like.

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