Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth Michael Bay directed Transformers cinematic outing, opened this past weekend to huge box office numbers. This week AwesomeToyBlog will take a daily look at one of the new toys in support of the film. Today’s entry is the Kre-O Micro Changers Combiner Grimstone. Grimstone is the combined mode of Mollox, Ironeye, Crackback and Iquanox.
In the box there’s 5 bags of parts – one for each robot and a bag of parts needed to build Grimstone. Each of the robot builds are essentially legs + tors0 + “backpack” + head + helmet. Despite the formulaic approach, each of the four robots, Mollox, Ironeye, Crackback and Iquanox look distinctive. They are also each well armed. To go from robot mode to beast mode, you need to take a few parts off and rebuild each one. In general this worked well except for Mollow – the flying beast. Due to some interference between the helmet and the ‘backpack’ I had to add an extra part to the top of his head so there was sufficient space and the helmet would stay on. I checked the directions a couple times to make sure I was doing it right, and I was. Weird.
Building the combined form, Grimstone requires you to take everything apart and start with the extra bag of parts. While some might think that’s a negative, I liked it as it made the process a little more involved and the result was a little better looking that I would have expected if you had just stuck the four robots together. Fully assembled Grimstone is pretty sturdy and stands about a head taller than a 3 3/4″ figure.
Final thoughts: The Kreons are easily the run away stars of the Kre-O line, so the Micro Changers combiners hit a pretty sweet spot. You get four Kreon figures which each have their own alternate mode and, on top of that, form one larger combined form. Grimstone gets an extra bump since each character is dinosaur based. The only problem I had with the set is Mollox’s helmet not fitting right in beast mode, but it was an easy to fix issue.
As with the other Transformers week posts – thanks to the fine folks at Hasbro and HunterPR for the samples that are being reviewed.
