War for Cybertron Trilogy Covert Agent Ravage/Decepticons Forever Ravage

Every so often, even now, a set of TransFormers toys comes along that has the potential to get me excited. Whether it's something new and unique, or simply a repaint into a favourite character, Hasbro sometimes manages transcend the current mediocrity of their products... and this was once such set.

It excited me because I was interested in the Beast Wars Metals Jaguar - the 1999 Japan-only retooling of Transmetals Cheetor into the Tripredacus Agent seen in the three-part Season 2 finale of Mainframe's seminal Beast Wars television series - but the toy, frankly, looks a bit crappy and, these days, tends to be very expensive on the secondary market, with some sellers asking over £350 for the boxed figure.

Hasbro's new version, released in 2021, didn't quite hit all the right notes for me and, at its full asking price of £49, was an easy pass. However, during their Advent Calendar sale, they dropped the price by 50%, and I felt almost obliged to order, just to have a version of such a fantastic reimagining of G1 Ravage, even though the accompanying part of the set would be possibly the fourth copy of the actual G1 Ravage toy that I've owned.

But was it a worthwhile investment, even at half price? Read on, and find out!

Packaging:

There are apparently some signs that this was intended to be a San Diego Comic Con exclusive in 2021 but, with the event's cancellation due to the global pandemic, Hasbro decided to repurpose the product as a Pulse exclusive. The packaging looks fantastic, with the toys arranged against a backdrop depicting the cockpit of Ravage's spacecraft from the Beast Wars TV show - the new Kingdom figure roughly centred in the window, with the G1 toy in tape form suspended over a slot in the console. This is in reference to the scene where Ravage attempts to preserve himself by transforming in to his ancient microcassette mode and stashing himself in his craft's command console - essentially becoming a black box recording which was referenced in Binaltech/Alternators. On the far left of the window are all the accessories - two handguns for the 'new' Ravage, and two chromed missile launchers for the original.

The one side of the box features a close-up of Ravage himself, cropped from the image on the back, with a short text story on the other, serving as a precis of his backstory as related in the TV show. The back of the box features a fantastic image, depicting in a single frame the scene from The Agenda (Part 3), in which a defiant Ravage cries out "Decepticons forever!" before transforming and stowing himself in the ship's control centre.

Much like Studio Series, the idea behind this packaging is to use the inner backdrop as a display stand... but such things just aren't practical for my setup, so it's going to stay in the box... which I may end up throwing away. This is a bit of a shame... but I did at least manage to recreate the scene with the toys themselves, once I removed them from the plastic shell they're mounted in.

Covert Agent Ravage

Beast Mode:

There's no doubt that, with this toy as well as the original it's based upon, beast mode is the obvious loser in almost every respect. This version is, perhaps, marginally tidier than the toy from just before the turn of the millennium, but there's a sense of 'swings and roundabouts'. The original, due to the altered engineering required to retain the beast mode head in robot mode, had its robot mode arms hanging off its beast mode belly. This one leaves the robot mode chest fully exposed on the beast's underside... but also leaves the robot's thighs and feet exposed. The latter are less egregious simply by being fairly small and, from most angles, pretty unobtrusive. The former are pearly off-white, armoured chunks on an otherwise black-furred feline. No amount of fur texture on the black plastic surrounding them can disguise or distract from them. They are an inorganic eyesore on what would otherwise be a reasonably competent sculpt.

Looking at them a certain way, one could choose to see them as references to the missile launchers on G1 Ravage... but for the fact that they come with sockets to holster the handguns provided with this toy. These are actually intended to mount backwards - with the barrels pointing behind him - as if they're rocket engines in this form. This could easily be the intention, as Transmetals Cheetor was able to deploy wings with rocket engines, and this feature did carry over to Ravage, despite the very small chance that anyone would ever choose to lark about with the toy in its beast mode. While the guns can mount forward, they end up pointing slightly downward, and directly at his own forelegs, so they're certainly not going to be useful as weapons in this form.

Disappointingly, there is no paintwork on this figure that is specific to beast mode... but then, as I'll get into later, there's precious little paintwork at all.

It should also be noted that, in package, Ravage's beast mode forelegs are attached to the wrong sides - as evidenced by the more bulbous side facing backward. Thankfully, they're mounted on ball joints, so it is a simple matter to swap them.

As with the original toy, the beast mode head sculpt becomes the robot mode head sculpt via minimal transformation so, rather than write about it here, I'll go into that detail at the tail end of the Robot Mode segment...

Robot Mode:

Oh dear...

Given that this figure is a retooling/re-engineering of War For Cybertron: Kingdom Cheetor - a figure which I decided against buying because it looks terrible - I suppose it would have been foolish to expect this to be a marked improvement. Sure enough, as with the Beast Wars Metals toy, this figure makes a whole new load of sacrifices in an attempt to represent the CGI character. Most notably, while Kingdom Cheetor's beast torso opens out and has the forelegs on the splayed-out 'wings' behind the robot's shoulders, this toy simply has them fold onto the back, where they partially slot into the voids left over by exposing the robot's arms.

This alone wouldn't be too bad - after all, the original Beast Wars Metals toy had its beast mode legs form part of a bulky backpack, poking up over his shoulders - but another change was made to Cheetor's engineering. The designer(s) who adapted the mold into Ravage decided to affix his beast mode tail via a pinned hinge... so, where Cheetor could detach his tail and use it as a crude axe/whip type of weapon, the best one can do with Ravage is hinge his tail back 90° so it's not visible from the front. Unfortunately, from any other angle, it's painfully apparent, and wastes shelf space by sticking out even further than his beast mode forelegs. What's really baffling, though, is that one more hinge - or just greater range of movement on the existing hinge - could have allowed it to fold right up onto his back. This appears to be at least partially as a result of Cheetor simply not having the hinged butt-flap present on the larger-format Tigatron mold. I accept that a free-dangling tail is wholly accurate to the CGI, but it still looks like crap. What's really crazy about this, though, is that the axe/whip tail weapon given to Kingdom Cheetor is derived from the Transmetals toy... so it would have been a more appropriate accessory for this figure than it ever was for Cheetor.

Like Kingdom Cheetor, Ravage has comparatively spindly arms, but his forearms look shorter and flatter than those of his forebear. Aside from the unique thigh sculpts, the legs are functionally identical to Cheetor, meaning the shins don't compress quite so much as Tigatron's, and his feet are disproportionately small.

The bulk of the paintwork appears to be on the thighs and upper arms, both of which are coated with the pearlescent off-white paint, with additional details on the fronts of the thighs picked out in gold. The torso is largely bare black plastic with a sort of cybernetically enhanced humanoid physique, including defined pectoral chunks and a sort of pipework effect on the sides of the waist. He has a sweeping band and a separate blob of pearlescent paint toward the collar, and a raised crescent of gold-ish paint below his robo-pecs, while the 'buckle' detail on his 'belt' features a red-painted jewel in a rectangular pearlescent frame. The original toy had an additional feature in that the chest could open up to reveal his spark chamber. That wasn't an option here due to the way the torso was engineered for his transformation. None of the robotic detail below the knee is painted in, but this at least matches the original toy. While it's nice to have some unique sculpted detail on his torso and thighs, the fact that the lower legs weren't also redesigned adds to the impression that this is a pretty lazy retool. He does, however, have the Predacon insignia tattood on his left shoulder... but it's red, which should normally make him a Shattered Glass Predacon... but the red symbol is consistent with the CGI.

The approach to his weapons is very much cut down versus the older toy. Where the original had little truncheons that would peg into spring-loaded, flip-out pistol grips mounted on its forearms, WFCT Ravage simply has two pistols, molded in black plastic, and with silver-painted barrels. They look pretty decent and, if nothing else, are not the hollow/waffle-like mess that some TransFormers weapons have become in recent years. They also appear to be reasonably true to the TV show's CGI, even down to the underslung laser sights, which is something that cannot be said for the original toy. They have 5mm grips for his hands, but can be 'holstered' on his thighs and, frankly, look better there in robot mode than they ever can in beast mode.

The head sculpt is one of the main things that originally put me off buying this figure. It's not that it's bad, per se, though the fur texture looks a little too soft and indistinct. It's not even that it's not accurate to the CGI - in those terms, it's only inaccurate by being excessively textured. The problem is that it's so accurate to the CGI, it doesn't look like a real feline head: the nose is suitably short, but it droops. The head, overall, looks reasonable when viewed at a distance and from the side. Face-on, it looks like the result of a failed attempt at taxidermy. His eyes are wide, yet beady, like the bulbous, unlidded eyes of a teddy-bear sewn into the oddly-shaped recesses below his thick brow. He also has a weird pearlescent skullcap that, while 100% true to the CGI, is a misinterpretation of a detail on the toy that extended down the back of his head and neck, into his collar. I like that his mouth opens, and the fact that both his teeth and his 'tongue' are painted really improves the look of the figure... but the position of the jaw hinge is unnatural, and it doesn't move a great deal.

As mentioned above, Ravage is a re-working of the Kingdom Cheetor mold and, below the waist, his transformation is essentially identical - the beast mode's rear, lower legs fold up to form the robot's bulging shins, and the feet fold out from the calves. Above the waist, it's very much simplified, with the chest opening down to allow the robot's arms to move in or out, and the beast's front legs flipping back on each side. The very front of the beast mode's chest slips inside the chest once the arms are deployed, and the head essentially stays where it is, just at a different angle. I suspect it's marginally more involved than the original, not least because the robot's arms have to line up with two entirely separate slots on his back when transforming back into beast mode. That's also perhaps a slight improvement on Kingdom Cheetor, whose arms simply lay back along his underside, with his hands left exposed just in front of his back legs. The trade-off is that the beast mode's front legs aren't quite so elegantly handled, draping off his back behind his thighs, while the tail, as previously mentioned, simply swings up or down, and becomes quite an eyesore in robot mode.

Of course, the cut-down transformation means that he doesn't have the 'wings', made out of the beast mode's chest, restricting the movement of his arms. Thus freed, they can rotate a full 360°, and swing up and outward through a range of 180°. His elbows are double-jointed for transformation, and he has unrestricted bicep and wrist rotation. He has waist rotation but, surprisingly, it stops at about 90° in either direction, rather than being unrestricted 360° rotation, and I can't for the life of me understand why. Where Tigatron has upper thigh rotation to supplement his well-articulated hips, Ravage follows Cheetor's pattern, despite the remolded thighs. As a result, his legs can swing back just a few degrees before butting up against the solid lower back/tail section, but forward and out by 90°. The only rotation joint in his legs is joint located just above the knee, which works well enough, but leads to the legs looking a little strange in the more extreme poses. The knee itself offers more forward range than backward, granting about 90° forwards, into the legs' beast mode configuration, but only about 45° of true knee bend for robot mode. The ankles can tilt forward and backward due to transformation, as well as tilting inward by about 90° for solid foot placement in a variety of poses. The head is on a ball joint that offers barely any tilt, and its rotation is seriously hindered by the raised collar. He does pose very well, to be fair, but there's a strong sense of "it could have been better", and both the arms and legs tend to look weird, regardless of the pose, simply due to their bizarre construction.

Beast mode is the more disappointing of the two, largely because of the shortcomings of the original Cheetor toy. The back legs can angle backward easily enough, but the fullest extent of their forward movement leaves them perpendicular to the body. The lower part can move forward and backward well enough, but there are very few positions that look natural thanks to the lack of mobility in the thigh, and then the foot is mounted on a ball joint. The front legs fare somewhat better, with 360° rotation around a ball joint mounted a little too high on the shoulder, but the elbow seems to have greater range when bending backward than forward - which might explain why the front legs are reversed on the stock figure - and the front feet are also mounted on ball joints. The head manages to retain some of its mobility, but it can't quite raise high enough for a natural, forward-facing posture when it's turned to either side. There's certainly no way to get Covert Agent Ravage sat at attention in beast mode.

Overall, I don't think this is a particularly great figure... In some respects, it's substantially better than the Beast Wars Metals toy that inspired it. However, it's a lazily re-engineered version of an already poorly-engineered update to Cheetor. To be honest, I think it's also entirely the wrong size class. It's difficult to be sure from his fleeting appearances alongside other characters in the TV show, but I suspect a (slightly downsized?) version of Tigatron's basic engineering would have been the better starting point, even it it couldn't remain a true Voyager class figure.

Decepticons Forever Ravage

Microcassette Mode:

I have very fond memories of acquiring and playing with my original G1 Ravage, to the point where most of his joints are probably now horribly loose. I had another copy in the Toys'R'Us Classics-branded Commemorative Edition rerelease of G1 Soundwave from 2007 (essentially a Soundblaster repaint packaged with Ravage and Laserbeak which I sold off a few years ago), and then acquired another in the 2009 Encore set, along with Buzzsaw and Blaster's two humanoid cassettes, Eject and Rewind... So this makes the fourth iteration of G1 Ravage in my collection and... honestly, it's a mixed bag. It's the same mold, obviously, and retains the G1 toy's die cast metal parts... but the paintwork is down to single-colour - silver labelling tampographed onto each side, and looking quite untidy where it appears over robot detailing on his left side. There's an interesting plus to this mode - that the spool details are highlighted with silver paint - but that comes with a horrific minus... The tape 'window' - a label on the original and the Encore re-release - is just a pattern of curves stamped in the same silver paint. I'm not sure whether or not some kind of tape paintwork is preferable to the weird Fortress Maximus schematic sticker that appeared on the Commemorative Edition version, but I certainly think it looks cheap and ugly.

Robot Mode:

This may seem strange, but I am inclined to think of G1 Ravage as possibly being the greatest TransFormers toy of all time, taking age, size and complexity into account. He's incredibly well-designed for a toy that essentially turns into a rectangle, and looks more like a cat in his robot mode than some more recent kitty-formers - Covert Agent Ravage included - in their beast modes. Granted, he's a little... er... slender when viewed from the front and back, but he remains the best-looking version in his robot mode. Sure, the Classics version packaged with Hound and the Masterpiece version both do a good job of bulking him out, and the latter may be technically better articulated, but I still prefer this one. I'm sure it's not just a case of nostalgia colouring my perceptions... there is just something about this figure that holds my interest better than any of the more recent reimaginings. Not least, the Masterpiece version feels far more fragile.

That said, this particular version is a bit of a let-down thanks to its cheap-looking paint job. I don't know why they felt it necessary to plaster silver over both sides, when just painting in some of the mechanical detailing - in that tiny section of the belly on his left side - could have been far more effective. All the G1 cassettes were designed to have one face to make visible in Soundwave's chest as 'cassette mode', and the other to be their robot mode and, in Ravage's case, it was originally left mostly unpainted. There might be a sticker or a rubsign on his left shoulder, but that would be it. Granted, this figure does have a Decepticon insignia stamped on the left shoulder... but it's tiny, and all but invisible on the background of silver paint.

I was very pleased to see that his missile launchers were chromed - had these been molded in either plain grey (or, worse still, black) plastic, I would have been very disappointed - but, equally, I would probably have accepted silver paint of they'd added the red missile tips from his original box art. Hell, for the red missile tips, I might even have been OK with unpainted grey plastic... Just this once...

What's disappointing is that the eyes appear to be more silver paint on this version where, on the original, I believe it was either gold chrome or tiny gold foil stickers. Either yellow or red paint (the latter referencing the G1 cartoon's insistence that all Decepticons should have red eyes) would have been infinitely preferable as, while the silver paint doesn't exactly blend in, it also doesn't stand out especially well. It's nice to see this mold appears to be in good condition, after all these years - sculpted details are clean and sharp throughout.

Transformation is simple and eternally elegant - the head swings back over the shoulders, the tail swings forward to lock it in place, the front legs tuck in under the belly and the back legs fold in below them... G1 Ravage makes for an excellent fidget toy, if you ask me, and serves as ample proof that TransFormers toys don't need to be super-intricate, with 80+ transformation steps, to be good, fun toys.

Where the G1 toy really shines is its articulation. The front legs have a range of about 90° at the shoulder, 180° at the elbow, and 90° at the wrist, while the back legs manage about 110-120° at the upper joint, perhaps as much as 270° at the lower, and the feet can manage about 180°. The tail swings through about 180° for transformation, while the neck manages a little more, allowing Ravage to adopt a proper 'seated' pose without forcing him to look up. What struck me about this toy - handling a G1 Ravage extensively for what must be the first time since I sold on my Commemorative Edition set - was that the articulation of the back legs succeeds by ignoring the hip joint: the upper joint is the knee. Thus, the small, plastic section of the back leg that offers mobility is the shin, allowing for far more natural quadruped posing, and the characteristic skulking, stalking posture of a cat.

G1 Ravage gets a lot of stick for being difficult to stand but, in the almost 40 years I've had one, I've rarely had any problem getting him to remain upright in any pose supported by all four paws. It's likely that one's mileage may vary, however, because there are signs of mold flashing on the underside of his paws... and if they're not perfectly flat, they won't be truly stable. For most purposes, in fact, I find that he stands well enough if his back feet are firmly planted, and just one of his front paws is touching the ground in some way, particularly with the added weight of his missile launchers at his back end.

So, now we come back to the question of whether this set was worth the £24.50 + shipping I paid, let alone the £49 original RRP... 

And that's a difficult question.

I'd really like to give an emphatically positive response, but I suspect my fondness for G1 Ravage and the fun I've had fiddling with, posing and photographing the mold again is making me feel more warmly toward the set as a whole. If I remember correctly, Siege Battle Masters sold for about £5 each, so I wouldn't want to have paid more than about £10 for 'Decepticons Forever' Ravage on his own. That being the case, Covert Agent Ravage works out at £14.50 thanks to Hasbro's pre-Christmas discount, at a time when their standard Deluxe price has reached about £25. By that metric, paying 50p less than that for both toys is an absolute bargain... but, unfortunately, it doesn't make me feel any better about Covert Agent Ravage in and of himself.

Had he been adapted from the larger Tigatron mold, the greater mass allowing for greater finesse in the re-engineering, this version of Ravage could have been fantastic. As it stands, it manages to exceed even the original Kingdom Cheetor mold in its abject mediocrity. That said, I do find that I am glad to finally own an analogue of the original Beast Wars Metals toy, at a small fraction of that toy's current asking price on the secondary market. The fact that I paid just half the RRP for this set sweetens that even further... and, with this version in my collection, be it ever so flawed, I no longer feel any urge to chase the BWM toy.