Death's Head
23-09-11, 08:25 AM
Rampage’s debut in Beast Wars was notable for a couple of things. Firstly, for establishing that the Maximals were equally capable of getting up to the kind of grisly experiments you’d expect of the Predacons and secondly for making Primus proper ‘cannon’ in the Transformers Universe. The toy, like Depth Charge, is a huge brute and another good example of a larger size class.
A massive King Crab, Rampage is a glorious toy to behold. His shell is nicely chromed in orange and stamped with a huge red ‘X’ – a nod and a wink to his origins as ‘Protoform X’, a failed Maximal experiment to replicate the Decepticon Starscream’s mutant indestructible spark. He has huge big purple claws and poseable brown legs. Whilst not as heavily detailed as Depth Charge, Rampage is a very good looking robotic crab. He has a superb range of articulation in this form, with the clawed arms being riddled with joints and poseable legs. This impressive form also gives way to probably the best Transmetal transport mode out of this subline. Whilst all the other Transmetal figures have had transport modes that do feel like something of an afterthought, Rampage’s really works. It’s still a barely concealed crab, but it’s enormous fun. After some clever rearranging of the crab legs, the claws fold around and in one of my favourite bits of Transformer engineering, rubber treads pull out from inside the crab claws and attach to the wheels revealed by rearranging the crab legs. This would all be for nought were the treads unable to rotate, but they do! Although not a proper tank, it’s great to have caterpillar tracks on a Transformer that actually work for a change. From underneath the crab, a huge cannon flips around and when you roll the tank along, the barrel rotates and it launches its missiles with a fair amount of welly.
As a result of the transformation required or the transport mode and to perhaps avoid giving us another obvious robot mode (i.e. having the crab claws double as robot arms), an attempt at a bit of variety for this kind of animal based Transformer has been made. Unfortunately, what this results in is a hugely kibbled robot mode, as you essentially stand the crab up, having flipped the robot mode out from underneath the crab mode. All that kibble makes Rampage very back-heavy, so he is more prone to falling over if not balanced correctly. All those crab legs and parts hanging about do give the character an extremely creepy and fearsome look, but they do also get in the way a lot and like Depth Charge despite having some superb articulation in robot mode, he can’t really do a lot with it.
Despite these flaws, Rampage remains enormous fun and the swift switch between modes makes him a joy to play with – there’s no time wasted on overly complex twists and turns so you can just get on with messing about with a very cool toy. There are reports , as with all the Transmetal figures, that the chrome is prone to flaking with time, but the only areas of wear I’ve noted are on the pegs on his sides where his claws attach to form the tank mode, but probably something to watch out for.
830831832
A massive King Crab, Rampage is a glorious toy to behold. His shell is nicely chromed in orange and stamped with a huge red ‘X’ – a nod and a wink to his origins as ‘Protoform X’, a failed Maximal experiment to replicate the Decepticon Starscream’s mutant indestructible spark. He has huge big purple claws and poseable brown legs. Whilst not as heavily detailed as Depth Charge, Rampage is a very good looking robotic crab. He has a superb range of articulation in this form, with the clawed arms being riddled with joints and poseable legs. This impressive form also gives way to probably the best Transmetal transport mode out of this subline. Whilst all the other Transmetal figures have had transport modes that do feel like something of an afterthought, Rampage’s really works. It’s still a barely concealed crab, but it’s enormous fun. After some clever rearranging of the crab legs, the claws fold around and in one of my favourite bits of Transformer engineering, rubber treads pull out from inside the crab claws and attach to the wheels revealed by rearranging the crab legs. This would all be for nought were the treads unable to rotate, but they do! Although not a proper tank, it’s great to have caterpillar tracks on a Transformer that actually work for a change. From underneath the crab, a huge cannon flips around and when you roll the tank along, the barrel rotates and it launches its missiles with a fair amount of welly.
As a result of the transformation required or the transport mode and to perhaps avoid giving us another obvious robot mode (i.e. having the crab claws double as robot arms), an attempt at a bit of variety for this kind of animal based Transformer has been made. Unfortunately, what this results in is a hugely kibbled robot mode, as you essentially stand the crab up, having flipped the robot mode out from underneath the crab mode. All that kibble makes Rampage very back-heavy, so he is more prone to falling over if not balanced correctly. All those crab legs and parts hanging about do give the character an extremely creepy and fearsome look, but they do also get in the way a lot and like Depth Charge despite having some superb articulation in robot mode, he can’t really do a lot with it.
Despite these flaws, Rampage remains enormous fun and the swift switch between modes makes him a joy to play with – there’s no time wasted on overly complex twists and turns so you can just get on with messing about with a very cool toy. There are reports , as with all the Transmetal figures, that the chrome is prone to flaking with time, but the only areas of wear I’ve noted are on the pegs on his sides where his claws attach to form the tank mode, but probably something to watch out for.
830831832