Drift is another main Autobot character in RID that has a sportscar for an alt mode, but for visual diversity he's more of a roundish sportscars, instead of being all angle-y and edgey like 'Bee and Sideswipe. In car mode, it's difficult to really see anything wrong with Drift; the proportions are pretty darned solid and show-accurate, and there are ZERO robot mode extras or even hints of extras. As with most RID2015 toys the mold detailing is fairly minimal, especially in this mode, given the streamlined look of most sportscars. Mostly it's the barebones basics, but there is some interesting detailing on the front grill, with Drift's headcrest present to help "link" the front to Drift's robot mode head and it also just makes for a nice faux car brand crest. There's also some angular ridges on the front grill, though most of it is in black plastic where you'd can't see much of it, unfortunately. In fact, that's my issue with this mode, which is a common issue with RID2015 toys; not enough paint. The basic colors are orange and black-- a nice color combo, and actually from Drift's original concept art in Age of Extinction, so it's nice to see them put on some version of the character. The black is fairly well-spread over the front and sides of the mode, and the windows are transparent plastic, but tinted so black that you can't see anything in them-- which, in my opinion, is how you should do windows on TFs if you can't make the interior look realistic. However, the back third or so is completely bereft of any paint, with the rear window not painted, nor the rear taillights. (In fact, the rear end does look a bit odd with the backs of the black feet making for odd black blocks in the middle of this back end.) The front area has some black paint, the aforementioned red crest, and some nice light metallic silvery blue paint for the headlights, but that's it. Comparing it with the show model, he should also have red lining his transparent black wheels, some gray on his front intakes, and red on his rear-view mirrors. He does have a red stripe along each of his side doors, but it's rather skinny-- it's much wider and thicker on the show. Drift's two swords peg in quite securely underneath his side doors in this mode, so no need to worry about obvious weapons.
    Drift's transformation is quite simple-- you basically just unhook the arms from the side, fold the hood down onto his lower legs like with warrior Bumblebee, and then rotate his rear body around and unfold a couple of small parts. The end result is a rather broad-shouldered, large-footed Transformer, but one that still looks fairly good in a stylized way. The arms are the least show-accurate part of him, with the curved front sides of the car mode obvious even though in the show they're more rectangular armor pieces with no wheels shown. His arms also aren't as thick as on the show, are black instead of orange, and in said show model he don't have car doors hanging off of them. On another minus, the hood sections on the back end of the lower legs are another obvious extra, but they don't get in the way of movement much and his legs are already rather thick without them, so they don't bother me all that much. I feel similarly about the little flap behind Drift's head, which forms the front grill of the car mode. Although the lower legs are definitely too large with proportion to the upper legs, this is the case (though to a bit of a lesser extent) in the show, so I can't fault the designers all that much here either. The "core body" of Drift looks very good, with some nice black stripes on his flip-down chest piece (albeit without blue headlights molded in or painted on, unfortunately), some nice "armor hip skirt" pieces that can fan out slightly, and a nice headsculpt that combines elements of his original "G1-ish" headsculpt with his AoE headsculpt and giving it all a beard. His headcrest is also painted red in this mode, with some gray on his face, blue eyes, and a nice thin black line down the sides of his face, to emphasize where the samurai-like "armor" around his head meets his actual face. I wish the beard was painted, though. As with the vehicle mode, Drift is definitely missing some paint in this mode, though it's not nearly as bad this time around-- the orange and black are broken up much better in this mode, it's just that beyond the head, the only robot-specific paint apps are black stripes on the chest and black on the kneecaps. Everything else is carried over from vehicle mode. He's missing several small-and-medium-sized red paint apps all throughout his body when compared with the show model, which is a shame because the red both complements the orange and contrasts against the black. For articulation, Drift can move at the neck, shoulders (at two points), elbows (at three points), a bit inwards at the wrists, waist rotation, movement side-to-side at the hip skirt pieces, and movement at the hips, knees (at two points), and back-and-forth at the ankles. Thus he's fairly poseable since his mass is distributed quite evenly. In addition to his swords being able be held in his hands (as you'd expect), they can also sheathe into slots on his left piece of hip armor, which is a nice feature.
    RID2015 warrior Drift is, quite obviously, the toy you want if you want a well-articulated version of the character complete with weapons. The car mode is nearly perfect-- only missing some paint-- and the robot mode is quite well-done too, but some of his simpler toys (especially his larger simpler toys) actually have more show-accurate robot modes, so if accuracy matters more to you this may not be the version of Drift for you, despite being a pretty nice mold overall.
 

Review by Beastbot

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