Bot Reviews: Transformers: Kingdom Voyager Rhinox (with Thrilling 30 Comparisons)

Kingdom’s slow, steady march through updating the Beast Wars cast continues, and has arrived at Rhinox, the combination tech guy/peaceful mystic/heavy gunner of the Maximals.

 

Over the three seasons of the show, he was the only Maximal there from the start who never changed forms or got any upgrades, but at the same time, didn’t need it, because he was the rock that held the Maximals together, the voice of wisdom and reason, amongst a cast full of big personalities.

And, likely because of his importance, he’s one of the few Kingdom Beast Wars updates that’s already gotten a new figure in a previous line, and this one’s the same size, too.

See, his original toy was one of the least show-accurate of the Beast Wars releases (or rather, most heavily altered for the show), lacking his Big Guy energies, as well as his iconic double-chaingun weapons. So, back around 2014, the Thrilling 30 toyline made a new, more accurate, chaingun-wielding Voyager.

And now, in 2021, we have another chaingun-wielding Voyager. So, the question becomes, is the new one better? On one hand, as time marches on, engineering and design gets better. On the other hand, budgets and cost of materials are a constant problem. I’ll tell you right now, I wasn’t a fan of the Thrilling 30 version, so it was my hope that the Kingdom one would be the Good Rhinox. But either way, let’s see how he did on his own merits.

Robot Mode

For whatever reason, Kingdom Rhinox isn’t going for the same kind of show-accurate design as the rest of the Kingdom beast cast. Instead, he’s more of an updated re-interpretation, keeping the broad strokes, but fiddling with a lot of details, like Prime Wars or earlier figures. Supposedly, he’s based on his design in the Forged to Fight mobile phone game. Some of those changed little details include his shoulders looking quite different, and him having a “samurai loincloth” based on the original toy’s.

He’s got an odd-looking headsculpt, in that it seems right at first, but when you get closer, you realize almost everything’s different from the show. He’s got greebled gold highlights, a smaller mouth, a wider head, stuff like that.

It’s very much a re-imagining. Still, it’s a good-looking one. The only bits of visual weirdness I don’t like are his big fake rhino jaw on his chest, considering the real one is plainly visible behind his head, and his odd-looking lower legs, which don’t wear their altmode parts well, and have panels kind of sticking out sideways.

That being said, he still looks like Rhinox, and more importantly, they got the bulk of the character right. He’s technically really thin when viewed from the side, to make how bulky and tall he is work, but his rhino backpack hides it, and the effect is worth it, because, correct details or not, it means he has the right energy, especially scaled against his fellow Maximals.

His colors are a muted green, with beige animal parts, gold accents, red eyes, and bits of black and pink on his feet. He’s also got nice-looking “freckles” on the beast skin. His color palette is kind of subdued compared to his more vibrant shades on the show, but looks pretty nice.

Another great thing about this guy is how he feels in hand. Despite being covered in rhino parts, he’s super stable and solid. I’m surprised he holds together so well and poses so easily, it’s really great. His rhino-head backpack is the only thing that doesn’t lock down, but it stays out of the way. I didn’t expect him to be this well-constructed (especially compared to the Thrilling 30 one, but I’ll get to that).

Rhinox is also surprisingly poseable for a big, animal-part-encrusted guy. Ankles, knees, hips, waist, elbows, shoulders, head, it’s all there, and it’s all very bendable. You’d think his rhino parts would get in the way, but miraculously, they don’t. His feet could stand to be a tiny bit bigger, though, as some of his more extreme poses are a bit wobbly. In particular, he’s got interesting shoulders. They’re strangely jointed, with one joint right on the top of the shoulder, and another attached to his torso, seemingly to make sure they had a lot of motion to them. On one hand it’s easy to make this setup look strange, but on the other hand, it means those shoulders are unobstructed.

For accessories, Rhinox, of course, has his all-important Chainguns of Doom. There’s both an upside and a downside to them, though. The upside: They are very well-painted, a brown base with silver and gold paint. The downside: They’re weirdly undersized and puny-looking on him, and also don’t rotate. He looks weird posed with them, like they’re underpowered.

They do stash on the bottom of his backpack, which is nice, but still, I wish they were sized appropriately for this guy. Speaking of stashing them, Rhinox has those two War for Cybertron ports on his back, and one on the bottom of each foot.

Transformation

It seems like Kingdom Rhinox’s transformation should be hard, and there’s a lot of steps, but it’s strangely intuitive, and I can do it from memory (unlike the Thrilling 30 one). And while the fake rhino jaw on his chest is a bit vexing, there’s something kind of satisfying about the way it gets schlorped up into his chest.

 

The big exception to this intuitiveness is the legs.

He’s a shellformer, and a lot of that shell explodes out of them, and needs to rotate into place in ways that involve bending and twisting them in a bunch of complicated steps, and this is coming from someone that’s handled (and enjoys) Kingdom Megatron’s transformation. Sure, I can do Rhinox’s legs from memory, but I tend to get them into positions where I need to squeeze and bend plastic past other parts to get things to work (never a good thing for a figure’s durability long-term), and need to refer to the instructions for an order of operations where I’m not doing that.

Still, it’s all much easier than Thrilling 30 Rhinox, and once everything snaps into place, it stays in.

Rhino Mode

This is another meaty slab of a mode, a big, thick rhino. Right out of the gate, I need to note that all of the panels on his rhino-skin shell hold together really nicely. Sure, his hide’s spiderwebbed with cracks from them, but he feels really solid.

Rhinox is sculpted realistically, including details like texture in his hide, and wrinkles around ears, but tail’s just molded in, sadly.

For colors, he’s now a lot more grey, with mottled spots, light-colored horns and toes, red eyes, and a mouth that even comes with painted teeth and tongue.

His big, huge issue is the green on the joints on his shoulders, left over from his robot mode. It’s really, really noticeable no matter how you look at it. and I wish they’d sprued it into being grey, especially since his robot mode isn’t being super-faithful anyway, so they might as well have given him greyer shoulders and made the beast mode cleaner.

He’s got green on the backs of his legs, too, and of course, clear robot bits from the bottom, but that’s all less obvious.

Another impressive thing about this alternate mode: It looks like a statue, but is surprisingly poseable. His back legs each have a joint, and so do front legs, and they come with a fair range of motion.

His jaw opens, too and while his head doesn’t raise much, there’s a lot more than I was anticipating.

Overall

I like Kingdom Rhinox better than most of the internet seems to. I mean, he’s got flaws, for sure, more than Kingdom’s surprisingly high baseline. His robot mode legs are odd, his transformation’s a little bit too complex (but not as bad as I thought, and out of the realm of “I need the instructions every time”), he’s got those visible robot-mode shoulders, and his guns are puny. I do wish his aesthetic was more show accurate, to go with the rest of the line, but I like his solid robot mode, and his fun rhino mode more than I was expecting.

So, while he could be better, and doesn’t hit the highs the line’s hit, he’s not bad at all, and I’ve been having fun with him. He’s also the best Rhinox they’ve ever made, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here:

Compared to Thrilling 30:

The key difference here is stability. You see, the Thrilling 30 figure one always had a crummy, loose, fragile handfeel to me. His shoulders are just perched on top of his torso, and come off with no force, the panels beside his rhino mouth don’t plug in, and come undone easily, his legs are too loose, making it really easy for him to flop over, and yet his elbows are too tight, meaning he’s just unfun and wobbly to pick up and pose, and something will come undone every time you do it, plus, you probably won’t be able to stand him up.

Kingdom Rhinox has none of these problems. Like I said, he’s really solid and stable. Still, the Thrilling 30 one does do a few things better. I like its brighter colors in general, and also for their show accuracy.

His head’s also a bit more show accurate, but is still kind of its own thing. In fact neither tooling is perfectly show-accurate, really. But I do like Kingdom’s more humanoid proportions to Thrilling 30’s tiny legs broad shoulders, honestly.

Another advantage the Thrilling 30 one has is that his guns are larger, and have a really fun spinning gimmick. It makes up for the fact that they’re unpainted beige slabs, really (though you could go to the Takara version or get some Toyhax stickers to give them color).

The Thrilling 30 Transformation though, hooo boy. Let me tell you a true story. Not only did I need to use the instructions still, after seven years, it took me about 25 minutes to transform him, and most of that was spent wrestling bits of his shell into place. He’s a shellformer of the worst kind. Nothing fits, everything needs squeezing and massaging. It’s just a bad, unfun time.

Kingdom’s transformation, meanwhile, I can do from memory already, and while it’s also a shellformer, everything fits into place if you do the steps in the right order. Granted, Thrilling 30’s jaw actually becomes the rhino jaw, but do you want that, or a transformation you can actually do?

The Thrilling 30 rhino mode is similarly unstable. The back clips together fine, but the front comes apart really easily. Both rhinos have the same articulation, but all of the Thrilling 30 one’s joints have problems. Moving his back legs exposes hollow parts, and moving front legs make the front of the rhino come undone, and his articulated jaw hinges inhumanly.

I like the brighter colors, and the less conspicuous green bits, but….that’s it. Bottom line: For all its faults, the Kingdom one, to me, represents a unilateral upgrade.