On the one hand, I’ve liked that the Transformers films have brought increased attention to a franchise that I’ve loved since my youth. At the same time though, I’ve always marveled at how movies based on fantastic toys could produce such shitty toys. While your mileage may vary, I’ve always found most of the movie toys to be either a jumbled mess (like most ‘cybertronian’ modes) that are so kibbly that the illusion of either one or both modes is completely shattered or so complicated that they’re absolutely no fun to transform. Unfortunately, there’s nothing in this Platinum Edition Dinobot 5-pack that changes my mind.

Granted, that shouldn’t be a big surprise as the pack is comprised of slight remolds of the Dinobots released in association with Transformers: Age of Extinction. The selling point here is that there are new heads reminiscent of the G1 Dinobot heads and the coloring/chroming to evoke the G1 toys themselves. Do these minor touches make up for the inherently flawed toys? Kinda…but it’s in an “adding insult to injury sort of way. The dino modes succeed to varying degrees…Grimlock’s voyager mold is still a bit of a mess though. It almost seems unfair to complain about not much in the way of poseability for the dino-modes, given that the G1 figures certainly didn’t have much…but that’s just it, we’ve had over 30 years of toy technology, so maybe a little bit more should be possible. It’s a bit of a nit-pick, but still. The deluxe class molds, Swoop, Snarl and…what are we calling Slag these days…Slug?...all manage a satisfying degree of weapon storage (okay, Slug can only store one of his two swords, but one is all he needs) while the voyager class…ugh…which kinda sucks given that those are the bigger toys. Sludge has a bunch of weapons that just post on the outside which, honestly, just looks kinda terrible and the whole mace/tail for Grimlock is all sorts of no, honestly looking better without it. The new colors and heads really help the robot modes, but everyone except for Slug has gorilla-elbows and no wrist articulation to correct for it. This ends up being a challenge on the posing side of things and just really annoying in the fact that again…the toys should be better than this. A couple of last things to note, first, my Sludge had some SERIOUSLY loose joints…and some of his more rubbery plastic parts were misshapen right out of the box and second, as one would expect, you can expect these Dinobots to develop a chromey dandruff at some point…as my Swoop is already in need of some Cybertronian Head and Shoulders.

To close, while the G1 homage is appreciated, this set really accomplishes two things: reminding you how much movie-based Transformers suck and screaming how badly Hasbro needs to get off their asses and give us some serious, G1-based or classics-ized Dinobots. Last time they tried was Fall of Cybertron Grimlock and, as usual, they just stopped with him, not venturing out to the others. Sure, FoC Grimlock wasn’t all that, but it wasn’t a mess of epic fail either (like, say this particular version of Grimlock. And to think they’re just going to repaint this POS for the next line of movie toys…ugh). I was able to score my set at a Ross and it only set me back $45…that’s $10 per voyager and $5 per deluxe…not a bad deal. They look good at times…but otherwise, that’s about it. As to whether or not I’d recommend them, well, I’m torn on that…leaning toward no. Still, I’ll let the pictures speak for me in this regard, if you like what you see, then by all means grab them, but I wouldn’t pay much more than I did for them.

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