Dave's Kre-O Rant: Microchange Combiners Wave 4 Grimstone Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/KREO/Combiner10 This wave is in Age of Extinction trade dress, new packaging style, new Toys R Us exclusivity, and a very very loose tie to the dinobots of AoE. It's also notable for containing all new combiners and a bare minimum of name reuse, mostly obscure newer names like Grimstone. The first AoE-era wave of blindbags contains no clear "blindbag buddies", although the two new beasty characters fit the general feel of Wave 4 combiners. CAPSULE $10-13 price point. Grimstone: Good individuals, although the transformations are fairly underwhelming. Combined mode is pretty good, would be better if not for the endemic stability issues that will continue until Kre-O either gets Lego quality levels or changes how they make neck pegs. Recommended, but might be better off left in singleton forms. RANT Packaging: While the new packages have the same rough shelf space as waves 1-3, they've simplified it to put the pieces inside a rectangular box in the corner of a backing card. No trapezoid shapes to confound simple stacking. The card is 7" (18cm) wide by 8.25" (21cm) tall with the top corners and bottom left corner rounded. The box part is stuck in the lower right, with dimensions of 4.25" (11cm) wide, 6.5" (16.5cm) tall and 1.25" (3cm) thick. The bottom flap is meant to be opened. The front of the box part has a retouched photo of combined mode on a generic grayed out cityscape background, using the same sort of pressed-card relief as some greeting cards. The cardback continues the background, and has the same stuff down the left side that were on the sloped part of the old boxes (both modes of all four components), plus a more authentic photo of combined mode. The box art wraps onto the top and left sides. The right side is white with logos, the bottom is red with UPC and legalese. The back shows larger photos of the stuff on the cardfront, plus cosells of the other three combiners in the wave. It's not clear from the package what side each combiner is on, if any. The instructions do have faction logos, however. Inside is the same as in previous waves: four individually bagged MicroChangers, and a fifth bag for the combiner kibble and extras. The decals will probably be stuck into the instruction booklet. (Grimstone only has four stickers for the limb kibble, no other decals.) Note, the instructions and package disagree on the names, swapping Iquanox and Ironeye. I'm going to go with the instructions, because at least their Iquanox could potentially be an Iguanodon, and Ironeye can be whatever the heck. AUTOBOT: GRIMSTONE Assortment: A7827/A6954 Components: Mollox, Ironeye, Crackback, Iquanox Total Pieces: 70 Kibble Bag Pieces: 13 Leftover Pieces: 16 (3 heads, 3 helmets, 2 arms, one pistol, 7 other pieces) Blindbag Buddy: None I'm guessing that all of the components are supposed to be dinosaurs, since the only previous Grimstone was the PCC dinosaur combiner. But some of them are pushing it. Looks: Decent, if a bit thin-armed. They just add spikes to the shoulders and that's it for the upper arms, I suppose the wings are supposed to stand in for bulked up upper arms. While the individual figures are heavy on the olive green and bright orange, the generic kibble bits gray down the overall color balance a lot. One forearm is covered in guns and the other is fairly plain, so I dispute the decision to make the gun-arm the one that carries the morningstar weapon. It looks better switched, so that the pistol is held in the gun arm. This time, they gave up on four stickers for four limbs and pose it so the stickered sides are visible. All four stickers go on the legs, none on the arms. About time. So, naturally, I accidentally destroyed one of the stickers. It turns out that the adhesive layer sticks to blocks better than it does to the printed layer, so when I tried peeling an askew sticker off to reposition it, I just got the top layer. D'oh. Not sure why they left off some of the pieces they did, as it's really easy to add Crackback's tail parts back onto the figure, and then attach at least one other piece to the end of that. Stability: The main problem with mine is that the two small torsos that make up the big torso barely hold together. They REALLY REALLY need to make those pieces snap together, since they just can't manage consistent enough tolerances to let friction do the job. A secondary problem is the wings, which pop off if you move the shoulders back even a little. Overall: A bit bland-looking, with the olive green, dull gold and various grays dominating. Despite the brightness of the orange, it really doesn't shine through. If you get lucky on the neck peg tightness (or coat the pegs in poster tack like I ended up doing), it's a decent combiner, although the wings popping off is an issue. AUTOBOT: MOLLOX Altmode: Pteradon, sort of. This has a new helmet, a pteradon-ish head that can be work in two positions, like other beast heads. This one doesn't take advantage of the second position, though. This figure also has a new pistol, with a secondary grip peg on the right side and a peg hole on the left side. I have NO idea why they decided "Mollox" was an appropriate name for a pteradon. It suggests a burrowing but strong beast. Robot Mode: Stable, and a mix of olive green, gold, gray and orange. The chest printing is gold and red. The backpack is pretty built up to make the wings, but the tail helps keep it from falling over backwards if you don't have it on pegs. Note that because the crest of the helmet clips over a piece of the backpack, the helmet can't turn. Altmode: Transformation involves removing the pistol, bending the legs, lifting the arms, and twisting the claws on the wing roots around. The result is basically a four-legged beast with wings, so more of a Monsterbot than a Dinobot. Overall: A very stable figure in both modes (well, both poses of the same mode), and it looks decent. AUTOBOT: IQUANOX Altmode: Iguanodon Robot Mode: Has the T.rex head seen on Trypticon, but in gold. It also has a gun backpack and a tail based on a sort of finger joint piece. Same basic colors as Mollox, but with black guns instead of gray wings. While it doesn't have the top-heaviness of Mollox, the tail is still useful for stability. Altmode: Transformation involves removing the pistol and turning the helmet down. Although, if you want to go with the original quadrupedal reconstruction of the Iguanodon, you can leave the helmet alone and just put the figure down on all fours (which will point the cannons forward). In official altmode, it's like a simpler version of Trypticon's dino mode. Overall: As with Mollox, the minimal transformation helps it remain stable in both modes, and it looks okay. AUTOBOT: CRACKBACK Altmode: Ankylosaur Robot Mode: Uses the Megatron helmet. While the chest printing of Mollox and Iquanox look vaguely like cockpits, but this one is just gold and black with an Ankylosaur back armor pattern. Officially, this leaves out two tail pieces, but it's trivial to build the backpack in beast mode instead. The tail club for beast mode acts as a spiked mace in this mode. Annoyingly, this is one of the ones where the helmet sticks firmly to the head, but the head doesn't stick firmly to the neck, making it hard to adjust the helmet if it goes on slightly askew. Altmode: Transformation adds the missing tail pieces to the backpack (if you didn't do that already for robot mode), snaps the mace into the end of the tail, and puts it on all fours. The helmet hasn't got any hint of beast eyes, since it wasn't meant to be a beast head, but the photography uses creative lighting to make one of the facets look kind of like an eye. Overall: The clearest beastmode of the four, if you don't take your cues purely from the helmet. Nicely articulated tail in beast mode, and again looks decent. AUTOBOT: IRONEYE Altmode: Some sort of dino. Robot Mode: Leaves four pieces out of the backpack for robot mode, but as with Crackback it's easy enough to build the beast version. While this makes the figure more back-heavy, it also adds a tail for stability. It has the Sentinel Prime helmet, which looks like nothing in particular in beast mode. Altmode: Add all the extra backpack pieces, move the pistols to clips on the backpack, hunch over some, and get...something vaguely dinosaurid, I suppose. The figure cannot stand unsupported in the pose shown in the instructions, they must've photoshopped out the stud plate. Overall: Bad choice of helmet results in a beast mode that's pretty vague. But it's stable and otherwise looks decent. Looking back at all four, the simpler transformations allowed by most beast modes, plus not being required to look like a previous character, definitely helped make MicroChangers that are much more stable than average. While they've come up with some clever engineering solutions to the challenges of some of the pre-existing characters, the lack of Lego-level quality control has cause those clever solutions to become frustrating fall-apart toys. So this set definitely represents playing to their strengths. Dave Van Domelen, dug out a spare Under-3 Beast Wars toy and contemplating giving it a new paint job.