Bot Reviews: Transformers: Kingdom Voyager Grimlock/Deluxe Mirage Battle Across Time 2-Pack

As I said when I reviewed the last set in this little Amazon-exclusive series, these Battle Across Time multipacks are continuing the modern Transformers Trend of boxsets full of such a strangely diverse grab-bag of figures, that it’s hard to find a set where you’re actually after everything in it. These particular two multipacks each pair an obscure Beast Wars character with a bog-standard G1 character, but luckily, I’m into both of those things. The second, and larger of the two sets, sees an unfamiliar version of Grimlock teamed up with an extremely familiar Mirage, both of whom were created from figures I’ve already had a look at here. This is arguably the more interesting (and mixed) of the two sets, so let’s dig into what’s changed. And this time, I’ll talk about the animal first!

Grimlock

Despite what latter-day Beast Wars fiction would have you believe, vintage Beast Wars was notable for how classic G1 characters were almost entirely absent from the lineup, and if you saw a name you recognized, it was meant to be a new ‘bot inheriting an old title. Grimlock was the single, lone exception, though. While the Beast Wars version of the toy didn’t make it onto the show, the bio note he came with (Remember those? Weren’t they grand?) explicitly identified him as the original Autobot T-rex we all know and love, a veteran who’d returned to the battlefield centuries later as a velociraptor.

The figure itself was a repaint of Beast Wars Dinobot in white and black, and, unfortunately, swirly gold plastic. Little did anyone know that it would suffer from Gold Plastic Syndrome a few years later, a malady where a certain kind of plastic would turn brittle and fragile over time (modern figures don’t use it anymore), so it’s basically impossible to find one intact these days (my cousin had him, and his robot legs eventually came off).

Well, Dinobot got himself a new Kingdom figure, so it made sense to repaint him into Grimlock again, and they did it with a twist this time.

Robot Mode

You know, I don’t think I properly appreciated when I reviewed Dinobot how well this tooling cuts a silhouette, and how it makes a nicely proportionate human-man-shape better than most Transformers, with only a tiny bit of junk on the back.

It’s an easy sculpt to make into a dynamic hero. This new version keeps the body, but retools him to have a new head, styled specifically after the original toy’s, which was heavily altered for the show. His new mug’s got a mouthplate, and a more angular helmet. It looks really slick and cool to my eyes, and I love how it’s painted, with its blacks and greys, and thin little green eyes squinting out from beneath it all.

Grimlock’s new colors were a source of mild controversy when he was first unveiled, because unlike Skywarp from the other set, they decided not to slavishly homage the original figure, but play it fast and loose with the layout. Sure, he’s still white, black and gold, but it’s all laid out differently, with some additional grey and red added. Basically, he’s no longer got spots.

Instead, he’s got a white body, with a black stripe in the middle, grey forearms, and a little bit of red around the sides of his torso. His legs are still mostly gold, but now have a two-tone thing going on, with the outside edges mostly being white, save for his thighs. Finally, his sword is still white, and his spinning tail-weapon omits the gold on the inside in favor of more black and white.

And honestly? I like this deco. I can’t even really put my finger on why, since it’s not one of my usual preferred colors.

Something about it just combines with the sculpt really well, and makes him look cool and dynamic (I know I’m overusing that word). The only weird bit of deco is his chest, since Dinobot’s fake raptor head eyes are still sculpted there, but are now totally unpainted.

Now, here’s the other reason I like him: His quality control is better than Dinobot. In particular, my Kingdom Dinobot (and a few others, I’ve heard) had a really loose ankle that made him kind of hard to stand up. This version tightens them, and overall, makes the rest of his joints feel a lot more solid and stable, too, a reversal to how this usually goes.

Combine that with his already-excellent articulation (in particular, his very expressive hands), and he poses real good. Basically, this guy’s cool.

Transformation

This is still kind of messy and complicated, but the tighter joints help. It’s still kind of a pain to get the thighs of his raptor mode to hold together, though, but I think it’s a bit easier on this version (or I’ve just learned how to handle them better.)

It helps if you make sure the robot arms hiding in them are positioned just-so (make sure to check the instructions), and when you’re tabbing the thigh-shell together, it helps to start squeezing from where it meets his body, and move outwards.

Raptor Mode

Surprise, surprise, I really like this raptor mode. Again, the paint isn’t the dalmatian-esque deco of the original, but opts for a white lower body, a grey stripe along his back, and a tasteful amount of black spots around his neck, as well as grey lower legs and forearms.

Something about the choice of colors makes his scales look particularly textured, and brings out the Jurassic Park-ness of the whole thing. It also helps that the two-tone robot legs show their purpose here, in that the white part faces outward, making them blend into the raptor body way better than they did on Dinobot.

Meanwhile, Grimlock’s raptor face has got its own intricate set of colors going on, with black scales around green eyes, a white snout, and even painted teeth and a tongue. Back when I reviewed Dinobot, I’d criticized how between the headsculpt and the particular shape of his arms, he came off looking a little bid dopey, and that’s still present here, but the deco does a lot more to downplay it.

Again, the only oddities are around the thighs, which have a bit of red from the robot mode, and still contain those unpainted eyes. Granted, it’s clear they left them unpainted to make the dino mode look better, but there’s still these unsculpted eyes sticking out.

I do still wish he was a bit more poseable, what with his tail and upper legs being totally rigid, but he looks nice, has better handfeel, and the deco makes the sculpting sing.

Overall

I did not expect to like this guy as much as I do, especially considering the odd choice to play fast and loose with the deco. But in person, I think I actually like him better than Dinobot. Something about this tooling and that deco just gels really well. Maybe it’s the improved quality control, or the more cohesive raptor mode, but I really like this version.

I don’t know what the audience for him is outside of “Beast Wars Toyline Rememberers” like myself, but honestly, if you have a shot at this guy, go for it, and if you’re just here for Mirage, you’re actually getting an improved version of Dinobot along with him.

Mirage

This new version of the blue-blooded Formula-1 racer occupies the same niche as the other set’s Sideswipe, in that he’s a retooling of his older Siege Deluxe, changing a dubious Cybertronian vehicle mode into a dubious Earthly one, though in this case, he doesn’t have a brother to match up with. This is a newer figure to me, in that I never got the Siege original, just the clear blue repaint that came with the Fan Vote Battle pack (another Amazon-exclusive Conceptual Grab Bag, oddly enough.) Still, I found myself oddly impressed by a figure that I wasn’t into the set for, so I was eager to see what an Earth version came out like.

Robot Mode

Whoof, they changed a LOT of stuff here. It’s hard to tell at a glance, since my other copy is clear plastic, but it’s something like this: Firstly, they redid the whole upper torso above the waist, as well as his shoulders (and the panels that hang off of them), and forearms.

The head’s the Siege original, though it’s different from the toy-style head the clear version has. The legs are…a big jumble of new and old stuff, mostly new. Point is, this is way more extensive of a retooling than Sideswipe was, but unlike Sideswipe, the mission statement here is a bit fuzzier.

See, squinting at photos of his G1 cartoon appearance, this new Mirage doesn’t really seem more or less cartoon accurate. Instead, the changed details mostly seem “different for the sake of different,” with no clear aesthetic shift, save for the fact that his deco replaces Cybertronian language with the number 26 and the word Orc (since the original included Elf. Cute choice).

They are nice colors, though. He’s mostly dark blue and bright white, with some tasteful red highlights around the chest, and bits of silver, black, and grey. It’s a good look. It’s also a shame that they had to go on this version of the tooling.

So, his first big problem point is that his knees are incredibly tight on this version, and unlike Grimlock, it’s not a good thing. Looking at his legs, it seems to be a combination of new parts not fitting as well, and some paint-lock from the white on his legs. Either way, it requires excessive force to move them. More critically, his lower legs are created from a few parts mashed together that don’t really tab together in a specific way, they just rest on each other. This wasn’t really a problem on Siege Holo Mirage, because his knees were loose enough that his legs stayed together on friction, but here, it’s really easy for those lower legs to come apart unless you wrap your hand around them when posing him. It just gives him a bad, janky handfeel, which is a shame, because he’s got the usual good combination of Siege joints, is really stable on his big feet, and even kinda has an abdominal crunch, due to the way his transformation works, but it just feels bad to mess around with his lower torso.

This version of Mirage has got the same nice set of accessories as the Siege version: A big, cartoon-accurate gun, a missile launcher, and a pop-out short missile, with its own mounting point for handheld action. Now, the big issue that everyone clocked as soon as photos of this guy dropped is this: For some reason, the retooled upper torso removed the mounting point on his shoulder for his missile launcher, making him less accurate to both the original toy, and his animation model, which both placed it there. It’s very strange that they removed that functionality on the supposed “accurate” one. He has ports on the backs of his shoulders now, and you can mount the launcher facing straight up, but honestly, it doesn’t look good. On top of that, for some reason, the War for Cybertron port in the small of his back is a little bit too large to hold anything securely. Neither of these things are big issues, but they bring the whole thing down further via death of a thousand cuts.

Granted, you can make him duel-wield his weapons, or even mount his launcher underneath his arm on ports located there, so it’s not a complete wash (He also has two more weapons ports on each leg, and ones beneath his feet).

I wouldn’t even mind the lack of shoulder-mounting if the whole supposed point of this exercise wasn’t accuracy.

Transformation

Of course, Mirage still has a fake F1 race car front on his chest, with his real car front formed from his legs, but that’s not the problem. Oddly, while the legs transform the same, the whole upper torso now works a bit differently, omitting a big torso readjustment in favor of a few more arm-repositioning tricks. Between that, and the new parts on the legs, what was once a slick, smooth transformation has become fiddly, particularly when it comes to getting the front of the car to peg together. Expect a lot of massaging, pegging and unpegging, and tiny adjustments, as you try to make it all click in, and all hold down. A big x-factor in this is that his outer leg panels, which fold up and form the area around the driver’s seat, are supposed to peg into the sides of his robot torso, but they just straight-up don’t, and come out at the drop of a hat, making the entire car split down the middle in the process.

Car Mode

Again, there’s a lot of retooling here in service of what’s effectively a tomato/tomatoe split. Basically, Siege Mirage’s altmode already looked less Cybertronian and more Earthly, so this one doesn’t read as more Earthly than that one. The nose of the car is different, the back reshuffles the arm kibble and gives it a different spoiler, some details on the sides are different, and the driver’s seat is open-top instead of a bubble (but this exposes its lack of a floor and interior). Basically it’s about the same as the Siege one visually, with the retooling being like rearranging the chairs on the deck, but the process gave it way worse, unstable, rickety handfeel. The nose of this car barely wants to stay together, and as you head backwards towards the driver’s seat, it actually doesn’t hold together, and there’s a noticeable split. I’ve transformed him back and forth multiple times, I’ve considered all angles, I’m massaged and adjusted best I could, it’s just not happening. Oh, and the vents and cowling behind the driver’s seat doesn’t plug in, either, it just kind of hovers above where it sits.

Still, at least the deco is good. It’s still got the same nice-looking blue and white, with grey accents, and his wheel rims managed to pick up some silver paint. I’ve heard some copies of the figure have the two halves of the Autobrand on his hood mis-aligned, but I got lucky.

It looks alright, so long as you don’t notice the split in the body, but this car just feels bad to handle, and getting it to look semi-decent is a pain.

Oh, and there’s weapons mounting ports on either side of the cowling behind the driver’s seat, which I’ll admit, is a step up from how the Siege one had them on the spoiler, in terms of aerodynamics.

Overall

This did not turn out good, and it’s a hard downgrade from the Siege tooling. Here’s the thing: They did a weirdly extensive amount of retooling that felt really visually unnecessary, and it didn’t really make him more cartoon-accurate, or Earth-mode-y. Instead, it made him less accurate (via the shoulder launcher), gave him worse handfeel, made him tougher to transform, and gave him a vehicle mode that no longer holds together.

Y’know what would have done the job? A straight repaint of the vanilla Siege version that changed his racing livery, and rendered his transparent blue opaque (the non-stealth version also had some clear bits, oddly). In fact, this version almost makes me want to go back and try and find the vanilla Siege release instead. There’s a lot of individual things I’d forgive on this guy, but they all dogpile together into kind of a mess, and ultimately makes him into something I can’t recommend.

The whole set

Jeez, what a contrast this is. The other Battle Across Time set contains two good figures, while this set contains superb figure, and one misfire (no, not the Decepticon), which was the opposite of what I was expecting. What we’ve got here is a Beast Wars figure that improved upon the original tooling with a cooler paint job, and better quality control, and a G1 figure that just dropped the ball really hard. Basically, if you can, get Grimlock, but don’t get Mirage, unless you’re going to sell him off, or are prepared to try and deal with the mess.

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