Shortpacked! by David Willis

Not content to release buttloads of single-bagged Transformers Kreon mini-figures into the world, Hasbro’s also got a larger assortment that gives you four Kreons and some parts and tells you how to assemble them into a super-robot, G1-homage style.  There’s Predaking, Bruticus, Superion, and Devastator so far, and I chose to do Predaking first.  He’s, y’know, animals, which are awesome, and I’ve had quite a few redoes of the other three guys over the past few years.  Predaking feels the most novel.

As I said, there’s just four guys in each combiner set.  The traditionally fifth guy you can find in the single-bagged assortment, and in the Predacons’ case it’s Rampage.  He doesn’t help make the big robot.  He just gets to stand there and exist, completing the set of Kreon mini-figures.

True to most Transformers beasts, the beast modes of the mini-figures are pretty one-to-one, with arms becoming forelimbs and legs becoming hind limbs.  They’re a bunch of crawling dudes with animal masks.  It’s kind of adorable.  They get a new specialized piece, an all-purpose animal head.  There’s holes in it various places so you can stick horns in there to make a crude rhino or a bull head.  The only one who doesn’t follow this pattern is Divebomb, the eagle.  Divebomb’s eagle mode is… not good.  And this is by Kreon standards, with the aforementioned crawling masked dudes.  You basically put horns in his feet and sit him down.  he doesn’t even have an animal head helmet like the others.  Ah well.

The individual robot modes are what you’d expect.  The’re Kreons, all based on the original Generation 1 Predacons.  You can attach some of the transformational extra pieces on them as the instructions show or you can just keep ‘em bare.  Your choice.  Leaving off the flak jacket is probably a good thing to do with Razorclaw.  The jacket covers up the decoed lion head/mane on his chest just so you can hang the felt mane off his back.  It doesn’t seem necessary.

There are several extra pieces to accomplish the combined Predaking mode.  There’s a separate crotch piece included which forms the crotch of the super robot, plus some specialized pieces that help form biceps and thighs.  The thighs connect onto the extra crotch via a balljoint, and the biceps connect onto the shoulders of one of the mini-figures inside the torso.  You gotta remove the arms of the mini-figure to do so.  At the end, you’ve got two mini-figure torsos stacked inside the super robot torso, two whole mini-figures helping form the shins, and the remaining set of legs to be the hands.  It’s not quite how the old combiner teams did it, which is why Rampage comes separate.  There’s not anywhere for him to go.

There are pieces left over in both modes, which is sad but understandable given what’s going on.

For ten bucks?  This is a friggin’ bargain.