Grimlock's alternate mode is a robotic T-rex, just like it's (almost) always been. He retains the traditional Grimlock look, being mostly gray with some gold/bronze bits, with some rusty red thrown in for good measure. It's a fairly good color scheme, and quite "G1-y", though I wish the red or gold or something was a bit brighter, it's a bit dull overall. The mold detailing is like you'd expect from Animated-- relatively sparse, but used in a very stylized manner. The circular details on Grimlock's legs look particularly good, as does his dino head sculpt-- it has a ton of personality, what with the severe underbite and all. It makes him look dumb, but fierce at the same time-- which, of course, is exactly what Grimlock is. The transparent blue used for the optics' light piping works exceptionally well, and works even in fairly dim light. As far as articulation in this mode, Grimlock can move at the shulders, knees (at two points), side-to-side at the ankles, and his back one and front three claws on each foot can move as one. His tail can also move side-to-side slightly. As far as gimmicks, Grimlock's got a simple but a cool one in this mode-- pressing down on the gray tab on his neck will cause his mouth open, while releasing it will cause the jaw to snap shut again. You can't keep the jaw open, though, unless you wedge something in it. Grimlock has three big downsides in this mode, though, all of them fairly major, at least in my opinion. The first is that his tail is laughably small proportionally. I mean, I understand the stylized look and all that, but it just looks ridiculous. There's also a fair amount of visible robot extras in this mode, particularly from the front, where his entire T-Rex chest is hollow, allowing you to easily see his robot upper chest and, worst of all, his robot head. His robot feet are also fairly apparent in the middle of his back. Lastly, Grimlock's weapon cannot be stored at all in his beast mode, which I always hate.
    Grimlock's robot mode is the better of his two modes. His transformation is almost spot-on the same as his G1 toy, which makes for a very similar-looking robot mode. His dino mode head and shoulder parts are on his back, but they're tucked away and the way the shoulder parts splay out makes them look like miniature wings, which looks sorta cool. His arms are a tad long proportionally, but otherwise just fine, and I like how the claws from the feet in dino mode carry over to the hands in robot mode. His legs-- a bit short proportionally-- are formed from the dino tail and back part of the main body, and although the tail parts are obviously tabbed into the side of his legs, at least they stay put and don't get in the way of movement. In fact, pretty much everything stays in place pretty well, except for the chest which slides upwards during transformation, which at least on my toy is on a slightly shallow and can flop up and down a little if more than a casual amount of pressure is applied to his main body. Grimlock has his classic G1 bronze chest design, though with some really cool circuitry mold detailing on a transparent piece of plastic in the middle, which looks just plain boss. I LOVE Grimlock's head sculpt yet again in this mode, which again has really good light piping and which takes the classic G1 look but adds his dino-overbite for the mouth, which just looks great and gives him tons of character. I also really like his neck is detailed so it looks like his head is coming out of his dino mouth, even though it's actually not. As far as articulation goes, in this mode he can move at the head, shoulders, knees, wrists, at the base of his back one and front three claws on each hand, and at the waist, hips (at two points), and knees (at two points), so you can get quite a fair number of poses from him. Grimlock can also hold his weapon, a flame sword, which is just flippin' awesome except for the whole "can't store in beast mode" thing mentioned earlier. There's a really cool-looking "hardened lava" spray paint app near the base of the sword, while near the top it's "pure flame". Plus, by sliding a tab on the sword, more little flame pieces can pop out of the sides of the sword for even more fiery power!
    Animated Grimlock is a decent enough toy, but there are better-designed Grimlocks out there (though this one wins in the "best weapon" and "most personality" categories). I think most of the weaknesses of this toy stem from its slavish translation of the G1 transformation, which doesn't quite as well with the Animated proportions. Still, worth picking up if you're a dinobot or Grimlock fan, for sure.

Review by Beastbot

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