War for Cybertron: Kingdom Tigatron

Much as I object to the use of Kingdom - the third and final chapter of the much-vaunted War for Cybertron Trilogy - as a perfunctory 'celebration' of Beast Wars in lieu of a dedicated toyline, I have to confess that I've been at least somewhat impressed by a number of the Beast Wars figures who appeared in the line.

Cheetor, however, was not one of them... poorly proportioned and with a rather sad axe/whip formed from his beast mode tail as his only weapon, he didn't seem that much better than the awful mess of a Universe toy from 2008. Given that the original BW Tigatron was a simple repaint of Cheetor, I wasn't holding out much hope for a Kingdom Tigatron to be much better. When it was announced that he would not only be a unique mold, but a Voyager class figure rather than just another Deluxe, my hopes started creeping back up again. When photos were eventually released, he looked - not to put too fine a point on it - almost like a completely different figure. Sure, the engineering was similar, but the additional size clearly allowed for refinements of the engineering, resulting in a figure that was objectively far better looking in both modes.

Of course, this being a Hasbro release, it wasn't without its fair share of controversy... because he ended up - somehow - being voted Figure of the Year in Hasbro's 2021 Hall of Fame, despite not being (widely) available until late January of this year. While that may have been a promotional coup, generating significant 'buzz' for the figure, many fans resented the inclusion of something only a select few had handled at the time of the awards, having acquired it by questionable means.

Mine arrived mid-January, and I've given myself plenty of time to familiarise myself with it... So let's take a look at Tigatron to see whether or not he truly deserved the award, and if he's as significant an improvement on the Beast Wars original as some of his Kingdom contemporaries.

Beast Mode:

Feline beast modes have always been difficult to realise. G1 Ravage did an excellent job for the time and size, the Masterpiece and Classics versions are decent enough, the Energon version's perfunctory bipedal robot mode felt almost unnecessary, while the Binaltech/Alternators versions compromised too much for their licensed vehicle modes. More recent versions, such as the dinky Siege figure, compromised too much full stop. Beast Wars didn't do much better, with Cheetor and Tigatron sharing a mold that was too chunky for either beast it was intended to represent, and the 2008 Universe remake of Cheetor was a disaster. Kingdom's Cheetor looked fairly reasonable in its beast mode, though, and this one certainly shares some of its design DNA, but improves significantly in some areas. However, there are many points on which it fails, and is just as bad as, if not worse than, his Deluxe class predecessor.

The sculpt, in common with most of Kingdom's Beast Wars remakes, is largely pretty good. It's not flawless - the fur texture looks better in some places than others and the face is weirdly shiny in places due to an absence of texture. While he's not quite so fixed-pose as the original, the back legs never quite reach any kind of natural position for a tiger, be it standing or in motion, the robot's thighs are an eyesore, and the robot's crotch plate is left plainly visible on the belly. While the visible robot shin armour on the backs of his beast legs is unavoidable, the feet protruding from its thighs could almost certainly have been fixed with a bit more work on the engineering, and the green panel on the back of his neck is, unfortunately, a fairly common symptom of the way the plastic molds are broken up on these toys. Aside from the way the beast's belly cuts off at the robot's pelvis, probably the most egregious error is the upscaled (and clearly bald) cheetah paws he has for feet - tiger paws are much rounder as they have more fur, and the claws are normally concealed. The front legs are probably the best part of the sculpt, going from the muscular shoulders to the sinuous lower legs quite naturally, and with minimal impact on the joints... but even this is an error, since a tiger's forelegs are pretty densely furred all the way down. A lot of work has clearly gone into this beast mode... but it seems to have been done without reference to actual, real-life tigers, white or otherwise.

This is also evident in the paintwork, though I'd guess a good part of the problem here is down to the budget. They've attempted to show the variation in a white tiger's fur colour by slapping a pale, pinkish yellow paint on the back, haunches and lower legs, but then it cuts off abruptly around the mid-point of his back, only reappearing on his front legs. The striping is a little more consistent, but the use of sharply-applied solid black paint ends up looking unnatural, and this is exacerbated by the fact that all the striping on his sides is perfectly symmetrical. Some of it - particularly the marks on his face and back legs - ends up looking like those cringy 'tribal tattoo' paint applications that were all the rage on cars (and toys) some years ago. The stripes running across his back and tail are the only ones that are not symmetrical, but even they don't look natural, and it's not clear whether their apparent alignment with the stripes on the robot thighs is intentional or not.

While Cheetor came packaged with just one weapon - the sad tail/axe/whip thing - Tigatron retains a version of this rigid detachable tail with its sculpted curve, but gains an interpretation of the original toy's 'gut gun', based more closely on the TV show's CGI. Since it's not really intended for use in beast mode, I'll go into a bit more detail about it in robot mode. For the moment, suffice it to say that the only storage options - a couple of 5mm ports on Tigatron's belly - are hardly optimal.

As beast mode head sculpts go, Tigatron's isn't bad. With the additional paintwork - more pinkish yellow paint on his short mane, some striping, a pink nose and golden eyes rimmed with black - it certainly evokes the idea of a big cat, but it's not particularly accurate to a real tiger, let alone the white variety. The brow meets the snout too high up the head, then the snout is too long and droops down. His ears are a touch too small and not quite the right shape, and the small mane seems to have been harshly groomed, as it angles sharply back in toward his neck rather than blending into it. Even the paintwork feels wrong, since the darker fur tends to be on the snout rather than in the mane, and there should have been touches of black paint on his ears, lips and under his nose. Plus, the roots of his whiskers have been painted in as bands of black - almost as if they were painting the whiskers themselves - rather than dots of black indicating their roots. On the upside, Tigatron's mouth can be opened to reveal (unpainted) teeth and tongue... though the jaw is hinged in the wrong place - it could probably have shared the beast head's transformation joint, to be honest.

Robot Mode:

Given that the only other Tigatron/Cheetor toys I own are the original Beast Wars versions (or rather, the 2007 Telemocha versions), I can't draw any particularly useful comparisons between this figure and anything else in my collection but, as representations of Beast Wars (TV show) Tigatron go, this one looks pretty good to me. Admittedly, the upper body is a bit of a mess, with the beast mode head and neck folding down into its back and the robot head folding out of the back of the beast's neck, while a couple of panels of the tiger's rib/loin area fold in below the beast head to bulk out the waist area. The arms sit rather too far back - behind the robot's head rather than in line with it - but I honestly hadn't noticed how weird that was until it was pointed out in a video review. I noted when writing about BW Cheetor that the overall design concept is about the closest BW ever got to the G1/Diaclone pattern of having the front of the vehicle turning into the robot's upper body but, aside from Kingdom Dinobot, this is about the best execution of that idea I've seen on a beastformer.

In common with the CGI from the TV show, the beast's shoulder/breast areas fold out to form wing-like protrusions from behind the robot's shoulders, and the beast's front legs just sort of hang out back there, arranged however one might please. They're certainly far less intrusive that the bizarre leg-wings of the original Beast Wars toy, and it's nice to see sculpted details on the insides of these 'wing' panels, albeit unpainted on this toy. The crotch plate has a similar design to that of the BW original, but with a much shallower, flatter sculpt - it still looks like a face, but now it's more like an elongated and emaciated version of Tigatron's own face rather than the fanged monstrosity of old. The shallowness also makes it look unfinished, possibly left at the 'close enough' stage by a production deadline. Perhaps even weirder than that is the design of the soles of the beast mode feet, which end up at the robot's knees. Due to the slots in what's supposed to be robot mode detailing, it looks like he has a couple of very surprised monster faces on his knees.

Tigatron's limbs look substantially better than those of Kingdom Cheetor, with the arms exhibiting better proportions all round, as well as hands that aren't encumbered with large panels of beast pelt. I'm a little confused by the notch cut out of the 'triceps', just above the elbow, which appears to be designed to allow the arms to be fully straightened, taking the protrusion below the elbow into account. The arm would have been almost completely straight without that notch cut out - the elbow is double-jointed, after all - and it's not required for transformation, so I really don't see why they bothered. While the legs are of much the same design as the Deluxe class predecessor, the fact that the beast's lower legs and feet collapse more fully into the robot's shin means his lower legs don't look quite so misshapen and oversized, while the thighs are bulkier and slightly longer, so the legs look more balanced overall. Sadly, while the feet are certainly a massive improvement on the perfunctory blobs Cheetor was saddled with, they're still remarkably ugly, and the fact that they're unpainted off-white plastic really doesn't help.

On the subject of paintwork, there's very little unique to robot mode here, which is both strange and disappointing. Where the Telemocha version had silver paint, this has nothing but a pearlescent sparkle applied. It's nice enough, and certainly seems to fit the implied colourscheme of the show's CGI, but looks a little weak and the sparkle is only really apparent in certain lighting conditions. It's applied to the oval panels of armour on his thighs and the upper surface of his forearms, while the raised half-oval details on his biceps have been painted a shade of off-white only slightly lighter than the plastic. Metallic green/turquoise appears on his shins - from the backs of the beast mode's lower legs - but the adjacent areas of sculpted armour on the inner faces of the legs and the rings around his ankles are unpainted. What makes this particularly galling is that Cheetor - a smaller and objectively inferior mold - does have painted armour panels on the inner faces of his legs. Everything else is bare plastic unless it was painted for beast mode, and the greenish-turquoise plastic - used for the shoulders, elbow joints and crotch plate - is a fair match for the paint in terms of colour, but it's not remotely metallic-looking. It might have helped to have some supporting paintwork on the elbows and knees, but that may just have highlighted the discrepancy between the metallic paint and the non-metallic plastic. I can understand why they didn't bother painting the details on the insides of the 'wing' panels, but a little touch of paint - either the pearlescent or some silver - would have been appreciated.

As previously mentioned, Tigatron's tail becomes a weapon in robot mode but, where Cheetor's tail had a blade at the base, and was held by the tip to resemble a kind of axe/whip hybrid, Tigatron's version has no blade and is held via the same peg that's used to attach it to his beast mode. I think arming a robot of any kind with a whip is stupid enough, but arming him with a whip made out of his own beast mode's tail is ridiculous. Thankfully, this larger figure - thanks to its correspondingly larger budget - has a second weapon accessory - the notorious 'gut gun' - designed to resemble the CGI version rather than that of the original toy, which functioned like a very simplistic water pistol. This one is brilliantly sculpted, with engine-like detailing in the middle, a clump of intestinal tubing at the back, and a good, long - and unashamedly pulp sci-fi-styled - gunbarrel. It follows the look of the CGI and the Masterpiece figure by being largely unpainted, which is particularly unfortunate, as the pale, candyfloss pink used for the 'guts' part just serves to emphasise the lack of paint elsewhere, and the tech-detailing in the midsection of the gun is just crying out for some metallic paint. Curiously - and perhaps in support of the modular approach to weapons used throughout the War for Cybertron line, the gun barrel can be unplugged from the main body of the gun, leaving one of the hexagonal 5mm sockets behind. Tigatron himself doesn't really have any useful alternate spots to plug either part in, but it does mean his gun can be extended with parts from other figures. Nevertheless, it seems like a strange choice to do that here, when the weapon packaged with Blackarachnia - which was ideally suited to having its 'anchor' section detachable - was a single solid piece. Had it been to facilitate beast mode storage, it might make sense... as it is, it becomes just another frustrating example of Hasbro's weird approach to these toys. If nothing else, the fact that the only indication of which way 'up' the barrel needs to be is the tiniest nub coming out of the tip on one side. Something a little curious about Tigatron is that he's one of the few Beast Wars remakes with a halfway decent number of C.O.M.B.A.T. ports. I mean, it's a grand total of five - one on each arm, one on each foot, and the one vacated by his tail - and he could easily have accommodated one on each thigh or knee, but some of these figures have had none, so I'll take it.

Given that Cheetor and Tigatron shared the same head sculpt in Beast Wars, but got markedly different faces in the TV show, it's nice to see that Kingdom Tigatron's head sculpt is unique. While the back of the helmet features textured and painted fur due to his transformation, the front of the helmet and his face are very true to the CGI in terms of their style and sculpt but, for whatever reason, Hasbro decided to replace the elongated Maximal symbol in his central crest with a simple blob of red paint. The rest of the helmet is painted with the pearlescent finish, while the face - an excellent representation of the wide-nosed, chunky-chinned, vaguely feline CGI model - is painted with the metallic green/turquoise, and the eyes are picked out in red.

By and large, Tigatron's transformation is simple and intuitive - the only thing that tripped me up the first time I tried, and which had me reaching for the instructions, was that it wasn't instantly apparent that the beast's face has to hinge downward to allow the robot's head to move in or out. There's also a small engineering glitch in that the 'wing' panels which hold the beast mode's front legs don't quite fit properly around the smaller panels which turn into the robot's waist. Transforming between modes, these parts have to be flexed slightly around each other, which looks, feels and sounds quite alarming pretty much every time it happens. There is a point at which they almost have sufficient clearance, but they still make a nasty click when one part moves past the other. Aside from that, the upper part of the robot/front part of the beast works extremely well... so it's rather disappointing that the lower/back part is so crummy. I like that they've included small flaps to fill out the front of the beast's thighs, reinforced by having the robot's feet peg into them inside, but then the tips of the feet are sticking out at the back. That, coupled with the exposed robot thighs and pelvis, really lets down the rest of the figure. One curious feature is that the crotch plate is pinned in place, giving the impression that it should be able to swing forward, perhaps so that it hangs straight down rather than at a slight backward angle. I'm pretty confident this is not the case, as it's very reluctant to move, and I'd rather not risk breaking the plastic around the metal pin by experimenting further. As far as the transformation goes, I think my main bugbear is that it's so difficult to straighten or pose the legs and ankles symmetrically because all the relevant joints are purely friction-based.

Once again, I have to remark on what a pleasure it is to think and write about a TransFormers toy's articulation both in robot and beast modes. Beast mode is far from perfect, but it's certainly adequate and, while it's certainly not on a par with the Masterpiece version, it does allow for a reasonable pounce pose. The most obvious problem is the fixed tail, since that belies any illusion of dynamic movement. Possibly even worse - and in common with both Cheetor and Covert Agent Ravage - the thighs can't swing forward. The extent of their movement brings them perpendicular to the robot's thighs, so his back legs end up looking stiff and awkward. Swinging them back in an attempt to create a walking pose doesn't work especially well as the legs then look unnatural, despite the excellent combination of a pinned hinge and a ball joint at the ankles. Thankfully, the front legs can pick up some of the slack, as they feature another combination joint at the shoulder - forward and backward swing handled by a pinned wheel offering full 360° rotation, with a ball joint on the top to allow a certain amount of forward/backward roll at the shoulder, and allow the leg to swing out by close to 120°. The knee has about a 90° range, and then another combination ankle allows the front feet to swing backward and forward, rotate and tilt a small amount. The sculpting of the feet makes some positions look a little unnatural, but it's nowhere near as bad as Dinobot's beast hands, and does make for some pretty good posing, even if it does leave the actual joint areas looking quite ugly. Sadly the head can't really move, as such - it can be untabbed and hinged down, as if for transformation, but it looks awful. The jaw does move, as mentioned above, but the joint is in an unnatural place, so it's probably best not to open it too far. One oddity is that the robot's waist rotation joint would be accessible in beast mode were it not for the very slight overhang from the backs of the forearms. The ability for beast mode to roll its hips slightly would have been useful.

Robot mode has all the joints we've come to expect from the War for Cybertron line, and Tigatron is well able to adopt all manner of dramatic poses. Naturally, the 'wings' restrict the movement of his arms to a few degrees' backward swing and prevent them going much beyond the 'straight up' mark when swung forward, but that's not uncommon among TransFormers toys, so it doesn't really bother me. Their full range of swing is well over 180° forward/back and about 100° out to the sides (slightly more for the right arm, but the left is restricted further by a connection tab). They're also mounted on a transformation joint that doesn't tab in anywhere, and thus allows a tiny amount of 'butterfly' movement, while the elbows are double-jointed. Additionally, he has unrestricted rotation at the bicep and the wrist, so there's really not that much to complain about in his arms. Waist rotation is unrestricted, then the hips offer about 100° of outward swing, with a total forward/backward range of about 170°, requiring that the legs be angled slightly outward to make the most of it due to the low-hanging outer edge of the crotch plate and small protrusions from the panel of butt-flap. The knees offer a little over the standard 90°, but that's mainly because they can bend slightly forward in spite of the presence of the beast mode paws. One pleasant surprise with this toy was that the feet, ugly as they are, end up being vastly more poseable than the average in War for Cybertron, as they need to swing into the leg for beast mode. This means they have about 180° movement forward and back, with about 100° of inward ankle tilt. The biggest disappointment in terms of articulation is the head which, while mounted on a ball joint, offers little more than the bare minimum of 360° rotation.

As fond as I am of Blackarachnia, Airazor and Dinobot, I think Tigatron may have become my favourite Kingdom toy... potentially even my favourite War for Cybertron toy. That's not as much of a recommendation as one might hope considering my generally low opinion of the toyline trilogy. The arrangement of robot mode's shoulders is quite peculiar, and the perilous, clashing transformation of the beast's side panels is both terrifying and evidence of lax QC at the engineering stage, but I still feel he's one of the better-designed figures. He's super poseable and very expressive, but beast mode really could have used a more extensive (not to mention less symmetrical) paint job. I half expect Takara Tomy to re-release this figure in about six months, under the Premium Finish banner, correcting all of Hasbro's oversights and omissions in the paintwork department... but that would basically make an absolute mockery of the 2020 Masterpiece figure, which - in the UK, at least - sold for about six times the price of this Kingdom toy. Other than the miserly paint job, some might have reservations about the hollow parts, based on experience of the Cheetor mold, but I'm pleased to see that it really doesn't seem that bad when handling this figure. Chances are, some enterprising third party will nevertheless create some filler parts, but I don't feel they're as necessary for Tigatron as they might be for some of the other Kingdom toys. Nevertheless, if they do, I hope the upgrade set also includes better - more cat-like - feet.