Dave's Beast Hunters Rant: Simplified Voyager Predaking

[Dave Van Domelen]

Dave's Transformers Beast Hunters Rant: Voyager Simplified Wave 1

Predaking (dragon)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Prime/VPredaking2

One of the odder things about the toy line this year is that they're
sort of continuing Beast Hunters despite the Age of Extinction movie line,
trying out some ideas for simplified larger toys that are inspired by
Cyberverse designs scaled up. I suppose the intent might have been to get
all of these out in the spring during the lull before the movie toys, but
they're just starting to show up mere weeks before the AoE street date, so
they might be kinda hard to find. The Legion figures more directly scaled up
to Deluxe seem to be mainly available in Europe and Asia, for instance.

http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Prime/Commander5 covers the Commander
class mold that inspired this toy. It was okay (mildly recommended) but had
some issues tied to the small scale.
http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Prime/VPredaking is the previous
Voyager Predaking, which did not particularly impress me (neutral).

While I'm not sufficiently interested in seeing if the Commander Beast
Hunters Optimus Prime mold could be improved by getting larger (I left it on
the shelf), I decided to see if they'd finally get a big Predaking I liked at
a reasonable price. I was pleasantly surprised to find that unlike Optimus,
this one really isn't an upscaled Commander, it just has a simplified design.


CAPSULE

$23 price point.

Predaking: Simplified (but brand new) design that is nearly Hasbro-
proof. Aesthetics suffer a bit from the cheapness of some of the pieces
(using a single chunk with a hollow back rather than two pieces), but it
compensates by being bigger than any Voyager I can recall. Really, it's a
Weaponizer class toy without the action gimmick, at Voyager price.
Recommended, with the proviso that its weaknesses are things that don't
personally bug me a lot.


RANT

Packaging: Same sort of box as previous Beast Hunters Voyagers. There's
no "try me" hole, and no gimmicks to try. Note that Optimus Prime was 001 in
the new series.
The new series has simplified instructions, a single-sided sheet a
little bigger than notebook paper, with instructions just for getting the
altmode, and a "reverse order of instructions" note. They're not quite in
full color, but they do have a few colors (black/gray, orange, yellow in
Predaking's case). There's no supplemental bio stuff anymore, nor any
storyline chunks.


PREDACON: PREDAKING
Series 3: 002
Altmode: Dragon
Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (2)
Previous Name Use: G1, Prime
Previous Mold Use: None (sort of)
Weapons: Infernum sword, missile blaster
Function: Predacon Leader
Motto: "Trust me, the past is not in the past...."

PREDAKING readies his battle-hungry PREDACON forces for an attack he
hopes will finish the AUTOBOTS once and for all!

STR 10 INT 8 SPD 9 END 10 RNK 10 COUR 10 FRB 10 SKL 6 Avg 9.125

Packaging: They continue to let the blister tray pull out of the
cardboard tray, rather than taping it in. One string holds the missile
launcher, one holds the Infernum sword, five strings hold the robot mode,
with a secondary plastic shield over the chest and kneecaps.
The box photo shows the sword-as-tail upside down. Neither the box nor
the instructions say what to do with the missile launcher in beast mode, but
the peg hole on the back of the sword seems intended for that.

Robot Mode: Bigger than the previous Voyager, that's for sure, about a
third again as large. There's a lot of clear or translucent plastic in the
design, so it has the feel of a redeco even though it isn't, if you catch my
drift. There's definite signs of simplification in the molding, though, even
beyond the reduction in transformation jointing. The head stands out as
suffering from this change, especially if you look at the back, which is
hollow. It's a single piece of plastic, rather than the usual two or three
screwed together seen in older toys. Well, okay, there's a second piece of
plastic used for the crest, but it's just stuck in the top, there's no
attempt to cover up the hollow back of the head. Similarly, the forearms and
thighs have a gappy latticework look so that they can save mold pieces.
Thus, while this is a completely new design, it still feels like a scaled up
Commander.
9" (23cm) tall at the head, with a maximum possible wingspan of 16.25"
(42cm). It's almost entirely shades of gray-to-black and orange, with a
little bit of silver, plus yellow eyes. A slightly metal-swirled translucent
cool gray plastic is used for the main part of the head, most of the torso,
the shoulderpads, the shins, and the dragon head hanging behind the legs.
Yellowy-orange plastic is used on the shoulder, elbow, hip and knee joint
ratchet pieces, plus on the dragon head hanging down as a backpack, and the
hip joints on the rear beast legs. The wing roots and the beast hind legs on
the backs of the boots are black plastic. Medium gray plastic is found on
the upper arms, forearms, and thighs. A slightly pearly light-to-medium gray
plastic is used for the crests on both the robot and beast heads. The hands,
feet, and missile launcher/missile are a slightly more flexible light-to-
medium gray plastic. I'm pretty sure the Infernum sword is yellow-orange
plastic. The main sections of the wings are clear orange plastic.
Deep orange paint is used on the "beard," kneecaps and some of the horns
on the beast head. A more yellow-orange paint is used to detail the chest
and abdomen, and might be used on the eyes (although beast and robot eyes
might be a proper yellow, it's really hard to tell). A yellow-orange
Predacon symbol is printed on the left side of the chest. Silver paint is
found on the largest spikes on the shoulderpads (fronts only), beast rear
claws, and some details on the dragon head. There's matte black paint on the
forearms and the wing bones, and much of the dragon neck is painted gunmetal
that actually matches well with the translucent gray plastic. The sword's
blade is airbrushed a gradient of orange, and then painted black on the back
side and hilt. There's ancient Cybertronian runes carved in various places,
but none are specifically painted to stand out. Obviously, inking them in
would be a simple home touchup job. The runes on the blade also deserve to
be highlighted, but I'm not sure if I want them to be yellow, black, or
purple.
The head turns on a swivel, the waist does not turn. The wing roots are
hinges that fold back, and there's a hinge at the "elbow" (very near the
root) to let the main sections of the wings extend or furl. The shoulders
and hips are universal joints that ratchet in both directions. There's
smooth swivels just above the ratcheting elbows. The wrists bend downward on
transformation joints, no useful articulation. There's smooth swivels above
the very stiff ratcheting knees. No useful ankle articulation.

Weapons: The missile launcher is something of a write-off. It's a
pistol shape with no paint, all just gray (making the flame-molding of the
missile kinda pointless...couldn't they have made it orange?). The
Cyberjet-style launching mechanism is so weak that I can rarely get the
missile to actually leave the launcher all the way. Fortunately, as wasted
plastic goes, it's nowhere near as bad as the previous Voyager Predaking's
gimmicks.
The sword is pretty nice, a flaming giant cleaver sort of thing 7" long
with a tiny 5mm peg hilt. There's two more 5mm pegs on the sides of the
hilt, intended for making the sword into the beast tail, and there's a 5mm
peg hole along the back of the sword about an inch up from the hilt. While
not clear plastic, it does a good job of looking like it's burning.

Transformation: Actually pretty different from the Commander, all told.
It's really only similar in the sense of being simpler than the previous
Voyager. (As opposed to the Twinstrike or Bumblebee upscaled
Legion-to-Deluxes, which are pretty much just upscaling with a bit more
detail.) But, just as the hollow bits make this toy feel like a scaled up
Commander, the transformation would be completely at home shrunk down to a
third the size.
On the decidedly plus side, there's plenty of good solid pegging. The
beast rear legs don't just hang behind the shins in robot mode, they peg on
solidly. And the robot feet peg solidly onto the small of the back to make
the beast body solid (if weirdly shaped).
One tweak I recommend is to turn the robot head around first. The beast
neck doesn't really cover the robot face, but if you spin the head around at
least there's just the spiky back-of-head sticking out.

Beast Mode: Yeah, the main body is pretty obviously a pair of robot
shins stuck together, and no amount of spikibitz can conceal that. It looks
a little better than I expected, but I'll admit to very low expectations
(i.e. the previous Voyager, which looked like a second two-legged monster was
eating a dragon and had already finished off the hindquarters). Probably the
worst aesthetic offense comes from the lack of wing articulation, and it's
nowhere near as bad as the mess we got from excessive and floppy articulation
in the previous Voyager, so I guess with Hasbro QC too little is better than
too much.
14" (36cm) from snout to tail tip, with a wingspan of 15.25" (39cm).
The wingspan is a little smaller than what's possible in robot mode, because
the shoulder spikes keep the wings from flattening out completely. Pretty
much already covered all the plastic and paint bits, but I will note that the
overall look is a bit more black, thanks to the hind legs being brought out
to play and the black paint on the forearms facing outward.
The foreleg articulation is the robot arm articulation, and the shoulder
spines interfere with the wings even more significantly in this mode. The
head can look up and down, but the mouth doesn't open. The rear hips are
smooth swivels. The wings have the same joints as before, but robot foot
kibble gets in the way and prevents the wings from furling (if you lift the
wings up over the toe details you can get them close to furled, but I'm a
little worried about stress there). The tail can wag up and down on its
pegs. Basically, Commander-beast-level articulation.

Overall: Hardly perfect...the hollow bits really make it feel like a
knockoff. But otherwise it's a design that aggressively confronts Hasbro's
QC issues, what with the simplified engineering and extensive use of
ratcheting joints. And, from my point of view best of all, it wastes hardly
anything on crappy gimmicks. Just a pistol that is easily ignored.

Dave Van Domelen, should probably get to those MicroChange combiners
next.