Do I have to explain BeastBox again? Righty, mechanical beasts that compress into boxes? Very collectable? 15+ age bracket? No? Oh, click here then. OK, let’s have a quick chat about a BeastBox I got last year. Amazon had it on a coupon.
As the serial number implies, Rhinoceros is one of the older BeastBoxs and therefore one of the simplest. He’s also a rhino, but I think that’s implied. He's not penguin simple, more akin to JoJo, but not Meerkat or Mega-Dio complex. This makes him nice as a fiddle toy, although there's a few things about him that didn't make for a great first impression. Rhinoceros here has accessories which store. This is good. You get a key in the manner of a wind-up toy, and a blaster sculpted in the style of a frog sticking its tongue out. Both are hugely characterful, which is good, but storing the key is inexplicably annoying. It just about fits in one compartment, but if you don't fit it in right, it's not coming out again without a tool. There is a tendency for it to catch on some tabs in there, and generally rattling. This is bad. It probably didn’t help my mood that I misplaced the key at one point, delaying this write-up, although it did eventually return from Narnia. The frog blaster meanwhile feels a little extraneous; I think its meant to go on the inside of an open side panel, but it looks a touch weedy. I feel they could easily have moved the peg along to make it a flip-out concealed weapon thingy. There's also a pair of 3mm-to-5mm port conversion pieces, which go unexplained in the instructions and presumably are there to assist with add-ons sold separately. That's not a negative as such, more that I’m missing something.
Putting aside the above, what's this Rhinoceros like then? Well, he's a toy that's more about the act of transformation than necessarily having an action figure that is also a box. The conversion is based on some pleasingly intuitive and tactile actions: the head folding into the chest, the "saddle bags" moving out of the way, and the legs moving to peg together. Surprisingly, the horns cause the eyes to rotate as you fold them up, a nice touch. Like I said, this is a fiddle toy, and it's pretty good at it. The individual modes are fine, if not the most tcompelling I've written about. Box mode is OK, benefiting from the Rhino having a lot of flat panels, if producing a forgivable underside gap where the legs are. The actual rhinoceros mode is nice too. The colour scheme works, a chunky/techno vibe from the sculpt. Its face has an opening mouth, and what I can only describe as the expression of a lawful neutral herbivore. You can open his mouth though, move his ears, and adjust the horn to move his eyes, thus changing his expression. Posability meanwhile is there, with ten points, plus what you can do with the head area, if not exceptional for its bulk. Each leg is ball-jointed at the main body, but the neck is fixed, and the shoulders are jointed in an odd fashion.
So, how do I feel about this white & grey un-moisturised unicorn? Well, I’m kinda… he’s OK. I’m slightly meh about the accessories, but he’s a decent robo-rhino, that’s satisfying to mess with. Its just that’s he’s not as fun as JoJo. Given that I got him half price, I really can’t complain, but he’s not something that excels. More something that exists...
No comments:
Post a Comment