Age of Extinction Voyager Grimlock

What? Another Age of Extinction toy review? Has DB gone mad?! Maybe, maybe not. But it's another Dinobot, so that should alleviate some misgivings. It's the one Hasbro always turns to when they want to represent the Dinobots in their toy lines, often ignoring any other Dinobot except...well, Dinobot that one time, and he's not one of the Dinobots. It's Grimlock, leader of this ragtag group of aft-kickers! ...Right. There's two of him in the Age of Extinction Generations line, the Leader and the Voyager. This covers the Voyager, as neither Leader Optimus nor Grimlock seem worth the price tag. Though the former does look much nicer than the First Edition version...



As always, (aside from that one time where he was a car) Grimlock turns into a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This time, he's bronze with black and silver. A tiny bit of red paint for the Autobot insignia, and metallic green for his eyes are the only other colors. Again, this isn't accurate to the movie, but I don't care, I rather dig the identifying color scheme for Grimlock as otherwise they'd all blend together and this isn't nearly as terrible as the FOC retail Combaticons. Like Slug, he appears to be made of lots of sharp, pointy things...though his tail looks more like a pair of boots sitting very close together with the feet pointing down. And his robot mode chest makes up much of the back. His torso is also a little lumpy... But his proportions are generally much better than the overly long body of the Leader. There's a simple gimmick in this mode where pushing the button on the side of his neck makes him chomp. This is actually really fun. The button itself just moves freely while the jaw has a spring to force it back open when released. The little dino arms are ball jointed, and there's a couple of joints in the legs if you really want to try and pose him in this mode. He can store his massive mace weapon by shoving it over the end of his tail. There's even a couple of tabs dedicated to doing this. I'm not sowing it off because it looks incredibly stupid. While we're back here, I'd like to point out that the little peg back here that's supposed to keep the robot feet together is completely useless. It's just too short to reach. No matter, the legs hold under the chest securely enough. So what say we compare him to Fall of Cybertron Grimlock?



Fall of Cybertron Grimlock is longer, but Age of Extinction Grimlock is taller and looks a little less like a robotic imitation of a Tyrannosaurus. But hey, I love 'em both! Let's get this guy into his robot mode and we'll investigate that.



First off, like Evasion Mode Optimus Prime, the instructions, while pretty with their full color, are completely useless. Why? Because they only go from alt mode to robot mode, but the toy itself is packaged in robot mode. However, he's not difficult to understand how to transform. Here's a hint: Most of the parts are in a similar spot or function as most other Grimlock toys. Tail forms the legs, dino legs form arms, chest is part of the body, do something with the head. In this case, it's splitting the head in half to use as shoulder armor. The end result is like some kind of tribal warrior mixed with a knight. I like it, even if I'm not that sure if he'll look quite like this in the movie. No new colors in this mode, the only new piece revealed is the robot head, but the details flow nicely together. Sadly, he's got most of the T-Rex neck and lower jaw hanging off his lower back, (though it sits over his butt) but it's not the worst I've seen in terms of kibble. The Leader toy doesn't have this, but does have a lot of cheap looking chrome on the chest and PVC spikes. The T-Rex feet are supposed to fold to the back of his arms and peg in, but that leaves him with gorilla arms. The pegs aren't all that strong anyway, and I'd rather enjoy the wrist articulation that's there without them plugged in, so I may end up shaving those pegs off. He features about 21 points of articulation counting the wrists. He's got no ball joints outside of the dino arms, however, and no waist articulation whatsoever due to transformation. He can hold his mace weapon via the handle near the top, which I kind of wish could have had an alternate handle further down so he could be wielding it in battle. It can also plug into a screw hole on the side of the jaw for storage. How about we compare him to Fall of Cybertron Grimlock again?



To the top of the spike on his head, they're about even. However, Age of Extinction Grimlock has a lot less obviously hollow spots. Since both use 5 mm peg weapons, you can swap their weapons and give Age of Extinction Grimlock a proper sword.

Grimlock is a great toy, and scales nicer with the other Dinobots than the Leader. His weapon is nothing really to write home about, though, but there's no threat of any chrome chipping or flaking. The Leader may be better if you for some crazy reason want an Optimus Prime riding him into battle like in the promo shots, but the Voyager I feel is overall better. And less expensive.

However, this isn't the best Dinobot in the line so far. For that, we need to go back to the Deluxe price point...

I'm not keen on the voyager Grimlock's looks, which is why I want the leader version, the robot mode for that figure looks ten times better than the voyager, at least to me, of course, some been saying the voyager does the Dino mode right while the leader does the robot mode, so, I think Hasbro & Takara should combine the two and make a PREFECT movie Grimlock!

my local TRU has a gazillion dinobots.