Posted March 20, 2021 at 9:14 am

Every round of reimagined Beast Wars characters usually only goes so deep.  You always get your Cheetors, Primals, and Megatrons, and maybe also your Dinobots, Waspinators, and Rattraps.  But Transformers: War for Cybertron: Kingdom is the first time we've been able to scratch beyond that surface to some other characters.  In that respect, Kingdom Airazor is the first genuinely exciting Beast Wars character to appear in it!  Airazor's last beast toy was in 1998, the Transmetal.  (It was redecoed for Armada in 2003.)   There've been two vehicle mode style Airazors from BotCon since, one being Energon Slugslinger with a new head and the other from the Slipstream retool of Windblade.  But again, both jets, and both retools and redecoes of other toys.  Kingdom Airazor is just... a new toy of Airazor, from the ground up.  

And it's pretty dang good!  It spends a lot of its budget on hinging the heck out of her wings, which helps with falcon poses.  They can fold up beside her body for when she's perching, or they can spread out for when she's flying.  They're jointed enough they can fold in on themselves enough to minimize their size in her silhouette in robot mode.  (They shrunk a lot during transformation on the cartoon.)  They're nice, big expressive wings.  

She transforms by wadding up her robot mode a bunch, just like the original toy, though stuff now has places to go and lock in, rather than just hanging underneath loosely like originally.  Though it looks like a mass of robot parts from underneath the bird mode, it still achieves the rough shape of a bird, so it still feels right.  My lone complaint is how robot-techy her legs are.  On the show, they were round and organicky, and if the Kingdom toy attempted a more show-accurate look in at least that one respect, her legs would work better visually in either mode.  They oddly stand out amongst the rest of her toy, which borrows heavily from the CGI model.  They really wanted to give her robot legs, I guess.

Airazor comes with two wrist-mounted weapons that can unplug and replug under her beast mode tailfeathers.  She's as articulated as you expect from a War for Cybertron Trilogy toy, including the waist articulation and ankle rockers.  Her neck in either mode has a good range of motion, and the falcon's beak opens.  

A pretty solid toy all around, which is what Airazor deserves after so dang long.

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