War for Cybertron: Kingdom Megatron (Beast)

While I always preface these toy posts, it's not often I have to start by explaining why I had a particularly hard time with the write-up... But this toy certainly has some baggage now. This is the toy I referred to in my Hasbro Pulse/Courier Frustration post. The one that was delivered to entirely the wrong location, despite the courier's insistance that it was placed in my hands; the one that Smyths kindly re-sent, only for the original to turn up two weeks later thanks to the dilligence of the local postman.

So, on the one hand, I feel an immense sense of gratitude surrounding this toy, both to the company I bought it from, for their excellent customer service, and to Royal Mail (or a representative thereof), who went above and beyond the call of duty to ensure it reached me when the original courier failed.

But, on the other hand, every time I think about this toy, I am reminded of the frustration and anger I felt, dealing with the courier company and the inadequate process they have for investigating non-delivery complaints. I had been on the fence about this toy, and now occasionally wish I'd never ordered it.

...And that's before taking into account that I will naturally have complex feels about this toy because I already own both the Beast Wars original and the 2006 Beast Wars Reborn set. It's a little frustrating that I have, over the years, developed a habit of writing up 'new and improved' toys before their predecessors.

Kingdom Megatron is certainly new... but is it really improved?

Beast Mode:

Of course, the funny thing about Hasbro being responsible for the TransFormers franchise, while their long-term rivals Mattel own the license for Jurassic Park/World tie-in toys is that Kingdom has given Hasbro the perfect opportunity to reimagine Beast Wars as almost a direct competitor to Jurassic Park/World: "We see your 'accurately' modelled (according to the long-established, so-called 'shrink-wrap model', at least), simply-articulated, CGI-based dinosaur toys and raise you transforming them into kick-arse robots."

 

Naturally, due to the necessities of transformation, Megatron's beast mode is broken up with a greater number of conspicuous seams than the typical dinosaur toy but, for the most part, he looks pretty good... at least, as good as a largely purple 'shrink wrap' Tyrannosaurus Rex has any right to look. These seams are a source of unfavourable comparisons with the original toy which, by and large, looked tidier in dino mode at the expense of significantly reduced mobility and massive wings of dinosaur shell on his robot mode. What you get with this version is a greater variety of skin surface textures, ranging from the scaly underbelly to the knobbly back, to the wrinkly, saggy throat... though I have noticed that the wart-like, circular bumps dotted about the BW toy are absent here. Not all of the detail is especially deeply-sculpted, but it doesn't need to be - what's here is just enough to make the figure nice and tactile. And I have to admit that, as Tyrant Lizard Kings go, he is strangely tactile... Perhaps it's the (somewhat misguided - more on which later) use of a rubbery outer layer for the majority of his beast mode parts, but there's something very... pettable about Megatron. I find myself picking him up and making minor adjustments to his pose whenever he's in beast mode... Partly because I feel compelled to find the 'perfect' T-Rex pose, partly just because the tactile experience of posing him is appreciably - and not unpleasantly - different to just about any other TransFormers toy, even the other Kingdom beastformers. The rubber used doesn't emulate flesh particularly effectively, but I'd have to admit that my expectations of dinosaur skin is derived largely from my experience of reptiles... and there's no way of knowing how comparable they really are.

There are a couple of small squares of exposed rigid plastic on his flanks, parts of the transformation hinges on each side, and more in and around the joint in his tail, but these are pretty low-key and don't really draw the eye despite being a deeper, warmer colour than the surrounding rubber. Probably the most egregious mismatch of colours around an exposed joint would be the knees: both the swivel joint leading into the thigh and the knee joint itself, embedded in the lower leg, are made of white plastic. Given that this plastic is also used for the claws and soles of the feet, and then only for a handful of transformation parts that are generally concealed, I'd have through black would have been the better choice, since it would be slightly less conspicuous when the knee joints are exposed.

 

Paintwork is quite limited - a heavy spray of green paint running from the back of his head to the tip of his tail, and then a weird, orangy-fleshtone running along his underside from the top of his throat to the tip of the tail. While his toenails are all white because of the structural plastic used in the feet, the fingernails have not been painted to match though this is in keeping with the original BW toy. Given that no-one really knows what a Tyrannosaurus Rex would have looked like, a little variation in the tone of the purple, or perhaps some darker paint to highlight what appears to be spines on the underside of the tail, would have looked good. I wouldn't expect paintwork to the same extent as the Masterpiece toy, but this feels quite lazy.

 

On the upside, his rather vicious - or as vicious as rubber can be - teeth are painted white, and his eyes have been picked out in red, much like the original BW toy. Given the enhanced detail of this sculpt - particularly of the head - I'd have hoped for a bit more detail in the eyes, but it feels as though Hasbro were aiming for an accurate homage to the original toy when, perhaps, the Beast Wars Reborn version might have provided the better template. It's another example of the inconsistency in Hasbro's approach to Kingdom's beastformers: much improved, super-detailed, contemporary CGI-style design, but a paint job based on a 25-year-old toy.

 

That head sculpt is pretty fantasic, though - again, within the bounds of the debunked 'shrink wrap' model of dinosaurs -  with the forward-facing eyes one would expect from a predatory creature, a wider, flatter snout and a rounder, more pronounced brow than the BW toy, the crown of whose head was actually concave. On oddity it shares with the Kingdom interpretation of Optimus Primal is that there's still no indication of ears on the dino head... but I think most dinosaurs are still commonly depicted without them. The mouth has been sculpted as permanently open - in the sense that the teeth are always bared due to a pronounced overbite and drawn-back upper lip - and the jaw opens to reveal a textured tongue and soft palette, both molded in the rigid, vibrant purple plastic, and with a 5mm port - for War for Cybertron blast effect accessories - located approximately where one would expect to find the uvula. The two jaws are connected in such a way that, with the head in its lowest, most forward-facing position, pulling down on the lower jaw will lever the upper jaw back as well, which is a pretty neat feature. I really feel that the head would have benefitted by a bit more paintwork, some kind of dark wash at the very least...

Ultimately, and as with Optimus Primal, the most significant difference between this and the original toy is that Kingdom Megatron has a more realistically-proportioned, better articulated beast mode, more in line with current movie interpretations of its dinosaur source. While I've no interest in acquiring any Fossilisers, I've seen a photo online of Paleotrex scaled up and superimposed over Megatron, and was very impressed by how well it matched - clearly a lot of care and attention went into this figure, so it's a shame the materials used are so dodgy. I have to admit, though, that I'm almost a little surprised that Kingdom stuck to Megatron's traditional purple skin for beast mode, considering the improvements to the sculpt. I get that it's a homage, and so kind of had to remain purple... but a dinosaur that looks this good, and yet is molded in purple rubber/plastic makes it look like a pound shop knockoff of a Jurassic Park/World toy at at distance... Probably a good thing that he's packaged in robot mode.

Robot Mode:

If Kingdom Optimus Primal presented something of a dichotomy between his 'realistic' beast mode and his TV show-influenced robot mode, that feeling is cranked up to eleven with Megatron. The most conspicuous remaining beast parts - the lower legs and the head - are a huge contrast to the CGI-adjacent torso, thighs and 'proper' left arm, but somehow it actually works... and, in some ways, the increased 'realism' of the beast head doesn't even make it any more incongruous than it was on the original BW toy. Don't get me wrong, it's still really weird, and still looks rather like a robot wielding a giant puppet head as a weapon, but if one can suspend enough disbelief to accept a dinosaur transforming into a robot, the idea that the dino head remains essentially intact, on the end of one arm, ain't that hard to process.

 

The sculpting of the torso is quite detailed, but only in the sense of being fairly elaborate armour - there's no indication of any of the robot's inner workings, and the closest it comes is in the two silver-painted vent panels on either side of the chest. These are quite true to the original BW toy, the Masterpiece and the CGI, just that the torso here was molded in the purple plastic rather than black/charcoal, so they've lost the darker frames present on all other versions. The painted section down the middle of the chest and across the waist is more defined and angular the previous versions of BW Megatron, which tended to be smoother and more rounded. In particular, the central strip of the belly on the MP toy looks almost organic by comparison. The two bands wrapped around the waist on either side are more squared-off here, with only small raised details, while the spikes in front of his collar are, broadly speaking, common to all versions of BW Megatron, but rather more pointed here. Silver paint has been applied to help them stand out, and they almost look like a row of dinosaur teeth.

Detailing around the pelvis and on the thighs is quite simple, but very much in keeping with the character model. This version is a bit more angular, perhaps, and with the main shell of the pelvis molded in more of the purple plastic with most of the central chunk painted gunmetal. The paintwork isn't quite dark enough to match the charcoal plastic used for his groin halves, but it doesn't look too bad, except for highlighting that both the Masterpiece and the BW Reborn versions added more colour variety in this area. The raised design on the front of his thighs takes its cues from the original, but is nevertheless entirely unique. Unfortunately, while the sort of 'leaf-shaped' part of the design is normally painted green, the whole raised section here is painted dark purple, further emphasising the incongruous white plastic at the knee joint. Weirdly, the missile pods attached to the hips have also been painted with the dark purple rather than gunmetal, and so I find they blend into the legs a little too well.

 

Something I find strange in the design is that his hip joints are essentially cylindrical - the front and rear face is largely flat with small recessed sections and some linework - where the other Kingdom beasts have tended to have more rounded - if not basically spherical - hip joints. There's no obvious reason for this discrepancy, and the front and rear faces of the joint have ended up with mostly hollow channels cut out of them. These are, at least, somewhat concealed behind his missile pods... but the hollowness of the thighs themselves is painfully evident. This is a common feature to a lot of the War for Cybertron toys - leading to lots of 3D printed 'filler' upgrade sets - but the other Beast Wars updates I own have done a far better job at keeping these gaping chasms to a minimum.

 

The backpack is, admittedly, far more heinous than even the most lazy folded-up car shell recent TransFormers lines have offered us... yet it's fairly well-compacted. It compares favourably with the dino shell wings of the original BW toy and, let's face it, won't require quite so much shelf space. The main problem is that it's comprised of a greater number of smaller sections and, while the torso shell sections don't look too bad in and of themselves, the addition of having the beast mode's thigh shells hanging down adds to the bulk. Weirdly, these parts make the overall silhouette of the backpack more similar to that of the original - without the thigh shells, the entire backpack would be up above the waist joint - albeit without extending quite so far back from the upper body.

Weapons-wise, Kingdom Megatron is kitted out in much the same fashion as his Beast Wars ancestor... at first glance, anyway. While I found the spring-loaded, geared, 'claw grab' feature of the original more than a little frustrating, and would have much preferred something like this - a poseable claw mounted on the side of a complete arm - there's something lacking in the execution here. The original toy had a somewhat compressed tail - wider at the base, tapering more swiftly to a smaller tip - which made for a more convincing claw mode that also doubled as a shield. Also, the paintwork here is substantially less subtle and, with no exposed purple rubber between the green and orange/fleshtone paint, even feathered as they are, it looks very artificial. As a whole, it looks less like a claw and more like a tentacle with some sort of vestigial flap attached, and this isn't helped by the perfunctory sculpted detail on the rigid plastic components of the claw's hinge. So, in the absence of something like the Masterpiece toy's hunting rifle accessory - all the more frustrating given that he has the standard 5mm grip sculpted into his hand -  it's left up to the beast mode head to be the more impressive and/or intimidating weapon... and it kind of fluffs it. Now, granted, if I'd bought more of the Battle Masters, or some of the larger figures packaged with the so-called 'Fire Blast effect' parts, I'd be able to jam one into Megatron's beast gob to simulate him shooting... but I had little to no interest in any of those toys (particularly the larger ones like Jetfire and Omega Supreme) and, having paid £50 for this toy, I have to confess to feeling a little aggrieved that he didn't come packaged with a dedicated blast effect part of his own, let alone the aforementioned rifle accessory. Plus, maybe I'm a little strange, but I really liked that Beast Wars Megatron's tongue was a water pistol - connected to a reservoir in his gullet, it could be slid out, filled with water and then, when the mouth was opened, it would spray out. These sorts of play features have fallen out of favour now and, let's face it, there's just no way such a feature could have been integrated into this toy... but it's still something I prefer about the original.

The head sculpt is utterly fantastic, though. Initially, I thought that it was closer to Megatron from Beast Machines - minus his Vehicon control helmet, of course - but now I believe it's just slightly more elaborate even than the CGI version of the original Beast Wars Megatron's head. While the paint on the face is glossy purple rather than metallic, and he lacks the light-up eyes of the Masterpiece toy, the sculpt itself is great. The dark gunmetal paint used to frame the face does its job very well, the darker purple paint on the top part of his head contrasts quite well, and they even managed to squeeze a Predacon insignia into the central crest on his brow. The expression on the face is closer to 'mildly grumpy' than the manic grimace of the original toy (though a version of this is apparently due to be used on the T-Wrecks repaint of this mold) or the condescending smirk of the BW Reborn version, and I find the red paint used for his eyes falls a little flat against the purple of his face and the gunmetal of the helmet... but my biggest complaint about the head is that rear face is unpainted purple plastic. Given that the gunmetal paint is a close-ish match to the charcoal-coloured plastic of his biceps, I find it baffling that they didn't use that plastic for the back of his head, particularly as it has been used for the rotating panel his head is mounted on. For all the care and attention that has clearly been lavished on designing this toy, some of the decisions made in its manufacture seem utterly careless.

For the most part, transformation is not dissimilar to that of the original toy, but for a couple of significant changes to specific aspects. While the torso and hips split and reconnect in much the same way, those connections are far more secure on this toy than they were on the Beast Wars version, to the point where it can be a struggle to peg them together or separate them. I'm inclined to put part of that down to the fact that the increased complexity of engineering - particularly the way the hips split and spread out for beast mode - makes it difficult to find a good place to grip. I was also quite surprised by the fact that the robot's body is essentially upside down inside the beast shell - that is, the robot's collar is closest to the beast's belly rather than its back. The head deploys in much the same way, but is free from the 'mutant head' gimmick of the original. Getting the haunch panel tabbed into the backs of the hips can be a little frustrating, but the main offenders - as far as the torso shell is concerned - are the three flaps around the collar, the sections of torso shell directly behind them and the tail flaps. The two side flaps of the neck are spring-loaded, and have to be worked around the rigid plastic plate that forms the back of the neck, and which is hinged at its base. The torso shell's most obvious problem is that the two halves don't meet securely at the belly, but the tabs just behind the collar have a habit of getting caught up below their slots. Meanwhile, the clashing rubber panels making up the base of the tail require a lot of work - ideally with some form of spudger - to ensure they move around each other as intended, as the clearance is nonexistent and the edges tend to bend outward. Once all of that is worked out, the two side sections of the tail can be quite reluctant to tab back into their respective slots in Megatron's forearm and the hinge of the claw. For robot mode, the way the majority of the beast shell folds up onto the robot's back is far from elegant, but it's reasonably compact considering how much of it there is. Whether it's an improvement on the BW toy's 'wings' is very much in the eye of the beholder.

In his beast mode, Megatron certainly puts some of Mattel's Jurassic Park/World efforts to shame in terms of articulation. Working from the bottom up, Megatron has hinged ankle tilt both forward and back (almost 90° total range) and from side to side (about 30°). No foot rotation, but that's taken care of just above the knee, which retains its full (approx 90°) range in both modes. The dinosaur hip shells are limited to about 100-110° of travel, which is more than enough to accommodate a decent running pose. The tail can raise and lower very slightly, as well as swing from side to side by about 50° at the base, with a joint at the midpoint offering about the same amount again for the very tip. There's no dino waist swivel, and the arms are on ball joints at the shoulder only, but the neck has full 360° rotation at the base, though it gets unnatural once it's past the spring-loaded flaps on either side. The head can extend forward slightly and turn through about 80° from side to side. There are two joints for raising the head, but the one at the back of the neck causes the head to separate from the throat, so it's best to only use the joint at the crown, which offers something in the region of 60-70°. The main limitation with the head/neck articulation is that it can't tilt down toward the chest. The mouth can open to very near 90°, but the tendons extending from the lower jaw only cover the joint for about 35-40° of that.

Robot mode articulation is almost identical from the waist down, but that the hips are unfettered by the beast mode's thigh shells. The downside to the legs is that the rotation joint is at the knee rather than at the top of the thigh, thanks to his hip-mounted missile pods. I really feel that these could have been handled differently, in a way that would have allowed a rotation joint closer to the hip. Even as they are, the legs can swing through about 180° from front to back, but only about 45° out to the sides due to the missile pods clashing with the overhanging parts of his pelvis. Having the rotation joint closer to the hip wouldn't have affected his articulation to a significant degree, per se, I just feel that it generally looks better and allows for more precise posing. He gains waist rotation which is not part of transformation (much like the original), and which is miraculously unhindered by his backpack. This joint caused me no end of confusion the first time I transformed him, due to the changes in the robot body's orientation within the beast's torso. It feels as if his waist should rotate 180° to transform back to beast mode, but it actually needs to remain in his robot mode position because the connecting tabs for beast mode are on the back of each groin half. His arms can both rotate a full 360° around the shoulder as long as the arms are angled out of the way of his backpack, and the right arm has a small range of 'butterfly' movement due to the extra articulation of the dinosaur's neck. Why the same arrangement wasn't added to the tail, I can't say - it looks as though it should have been possible. The arms are probably the biggest bone of contention for me, since the right arm is arranged per the original Beast Wars toy, with the 'elbow' offering its fullest range with the beast head oriented chin-up, yet this exposes the mushroom peg of the bicep rotation joint. The sculpt of the bicep chunk implies that the beast head should be brow-up, but the range of movement available to the elbow in this orientation is much reduced - supplemented somewhat by the beast head's ability to look up via what has effectively become the wrist joint - and one has to rely on the shoulder to do most of the posing. Here, too, the right arm is comparatively limited, since the sculpt of the shoulder armour limits the upper arm to about 40-50° of ourward motion. Given the additional bulk stuck on the left forearm, one might expect that to be the more limited of the two, but the asymmetry of the shoulder armour grants him closer to 70° outward swing, while the elbow achieves a full range of 180°, since it's basically the beast mode's first tail joint but is no longer restricted by the beast mode's shell. It's also a little loose on mine - no so much so that it can't hold a pose, but some small detents in the joint would have been helpful. He additionally has a largely pointless wrist joint that allows him to bend his fist up by a completely unnatural 90° via a pinned hinge. The tail/claw weapon has a rotation joint to reorient the tip of the tail, and retains the midpoint's hinge, while the serrated 'thumb' part of the claw has a full range of about 180° for transformation. His head is on a ball joint, by the looks of it, but the design of the head limits it to 360° rotation and the barest hint of backward tilt.

 

So all of that sounds pretty good - almost exceptional, perhaps - and is certainly an improvement on the original BW toy... However, this toy does come with caveats. I don't think I've ever had a section in one of my toy posts - certainly a toy 'review' post - devoted specifically to citing the laundry list of problems with a toy, but here we are. Good as he is, Kingdom Megatron is far from perfect, and that seems to be mainly due to a combination of overengineering and the misguided decision to use soft, rubbery plastic for most of the beast mode's outer shell, with a supporting inner framework of rigid plastic. Given that every time I've encountered rubber parts on a TransFormers toy, they have warped to one degree or another, occasionally making it impossible to close up the gaps between panels, such extensive use of it here is absolutely insane.

 

Then there's the concerns some fans have expressed over the basic longevity of rubber versus rigid plastic. I don't believe the kind used here will be prone to perishing - it's rather more durable than that - but its tendency to warp due to poor clearance around certain joints may eventually cause more extensive damage. Then there's the questions some fans have raised about the likelihood of the plasticiser bleeding out of the rubber parts and attacking another toy, if they're left in contact with each other for any length of time. As with perishing, this happens with some combinations of rubber/plastic and not others. Considering this toy is made up of rubber parts attached to rigid plastic parts, it seems unlikely that Hasbro would use a material from which plasticiser transfer is likely... but still worth taking precautions against, where possible. My main longevity complaint would be the ankle joints, all parts of which are the rubbery plastic, held together by a metal pin. If there was any misalignment in that joint, frequent play/posing could result in part of this joint tearing... but I suspect even that is fairly unlikely. Aside from that, I'd only really be worried about the rubber getting stained over time, through frequent play.

I can't help but feel that most of these problems could - and should - have been identified at the prototype stage, and that the toy should have been redeveloped entirely with solid plastic.

Here are a few photos to illustrate the more obvious problems on my copy:

 

In the first picture, the upper tips of the torso plates should be on the same level as the base of the gullet, not overlapping it - the angles of those two plates correspond with the small amount of swing available to that particular joint in the neck. Proper alignment can be achieved by holding the gullet and pushing these two corners in behind it, but it won't stay in place, not least because those two plates won't stay tabbed together.
In the second picture, the two tabs on the base of the torso plates are supposed to fit together into a corresponding slot in the inside the base of the tail. This would help the torso plates stay together, but they refuse to stay in place - whether because the tabs are too large to fit in the first place, or too small to achieve any real grip in the slot, I can't be sure. Part of the problem, certainly, is that those two torso plates just don't like to close up properly.

Here we have a combination of factors leading to a very wide seam between mismatched parts. In theory, this should be a perfect fit, but the way the pelvis plugs into the body (you can see it doesn't properly align with the edge of the beast's flank either), coupled with the way the haunch plate fits over it and the warping of the rubber parts, means that this part never comes together properly. It's marginally better on the other side, because the haunch plate is less warped there. I've also found that the haunch late is inclined to pop out of its sockets during transformation, and this is only going to get worse over time.

 

As mentioned in the transformation section, above, the biggest problem is here, with the tail sections. The rectangular section is the double hinge that allows the tail to open out from the underside and wrap back around itself. It is molded wholly in rubber, and just doesn't fit the space. Whether this is because the three main tail sections, or the joints themselves are poorly fitted or warped, I can't be sure... but the larger rubber parts don't align very well with each other, and the joint has to be forced past their edges during transformation to minimise the risk of the warping. This seems to have already occurred on one corner of the righthand lower tail section on mine - and this was evident straight out of the box. Tapering the edges may have emphasised the seams further, but it would have helped the individual sections move smoothly around each other. Additionally, these parts are hinged by metal pins, and if sufficient force is applied to these joints while the rubber panels are butting up against each other, there's a chance that the rectangular panel may start to tear off its hinge over time.

 

 

Here we have a close-up view of robot mode's most egregious problem: the ill-fitting groin clip. This has been mentioned in several YouTube reviews, so it looks to be a widespread issue. You can even see, just about, that the ridged tab extending from the half on the right (of the photo) is just a touch too high to properly lock with the slot in the half on the left. It's possible make it work - temporarily - by really pushing up on the two halves once they're together, but the weight of the upper body will quickly cause them to separate while on display, particularly if he's posed with his legs spread out. It feels as if an extra piece could have been added to hinge down and secure the two large tabs present on the back of the groin (used for connecting the beast mode's hips into the haunch plate).

 

I honestly don't understand why there should be plastic stress marks at the circled point on the right, unless it's just that too much force was applied when attaching the rubber shell to the inner framework. It's not getting any worse, so repeated transformations clearly aren't a factor. Additionally, the rubber shell wasn't even properly fitted on the left - its peg was glued to the frame outside its intended socket - leading to warping. I hope to be able to fix this, but found just a couple of days ago that my superglue had dried up in its tube.

This has been a really difficult toy to form a consistent and objective opinion on... It's close to being great, but bogged down by the poor choices made before they went into final production. I believe that genuine passion went into desiging this toy, but the end result doesn't adequately reflect or reward it. Perhaps it was nerfed by its budget, perhaps it was overly ambitious and, granted, the fit of the rubber parts will likely be better on many copies of the figure. In its favour, the fact that it's basically the same size as the BW original, but better articulated at the expense of some gimmicks that not everyone would want, means that it comes close to earning its Leader class label in my opinion... However, if a Kingdom Deluxe is £18 and a Voyager is £25, this thing should be £40, tops. £50 for this thing would be too much even if it was perfect (and came with at least one blast effect) and, as I hope I've adequately elucidated, Kingdom Megatron ain't anywhere close to perfect.

Back at the start of this post, I posed the question 'is this an improvement on the original BW toy?', and I would have to say that it is not. It's better articulated and better painted than the original but that's only to be expected in comparison with a toy made 25 years ago. That's the minimum expectation. One would tend to hope that more significant improvements could be made in the intervening quarter century, but precious few have been made manifest in the finished product.

Nevertheless, I have to say that I like this toy and, now it's in my possession, I'm glad I flip-flopped back to wanting it for long enough to put in the order. The delivery issues have dampened my enthusiasm toward it, but I doubt that feeling will persist for long... It's such a fun, dynamic toy, posing it in either mode is enjoyable in ways that I've not experienced with many official TransFormers toys and, incongruous as it is, I kind of like the combination/juxtaposition of 'lifelike' beast mode styling and a robot mode derived from the TV show's CGI. I might even be tempted to say that Megatron is my favourite toy from the whole War for Cybertron series, not just Kingdom... But even that isn't exactly high praise: I'm just saying he's the best of a bad bunch.

Some fans have suggested that the way the dinosaur legs have been handled - with the dino thighs being shells clipped loosely over the robot thighs, separately articulated via a complementary slider that sits above and around the actual hip joint - suggests the possible intention of repurposing the basic structure of the toy, with extensive remolding, as TransMetals Megatron. I can see why they think that, but it seems to me that beast Megatron's inclusion in War for Cybertron: Kingdom precludes the possibility of a TransMetals reboot. Perhaps there's a vague plan to release a solus TransMetals Megatron as a Hasbro Pulse exclusive, but even that seems a little unlikely at this point. A T-Wrecks repaint has been leaked and, barring any Netflix editions, I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see any other variants on this mold. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if Hasbro lose interest in Kingdom in much the same way they did Power of the Primes... and if the newly-revealed Kingdom Galvatron is the note they choose to go out on, I could hardly blame them.