Lovegun

It's America's 250th birthday, and only Frank Reynolds seems to have the appropriate level of enthusiasm. Some companies that utterly failed to read the room are attempting to cash in anyway, like Hasbro, who has an entire assortment of embarrassing red, white, and blue "patriotic" repaints that nobody wanted. Why buy a repainted Airazor named "Star Eagle" when you could get a transforming toy that really respresents American exceptionalism! Chinese company 52Toys is known for their Beast Box line, which features robotic creatures that turn into simple cubes. All the cubes we've reviewed so far have been the same size - about 1⅝" - but this one is slightly larger, a full 2". That might not be too much of a surprise, since this one is more involved than all its brethren, taking things to a new level by dint of being a triple-changer! Lovegun is a Beastbox unit once shaped as a peace dove to symbolize ceasefire and peace. Before delivery, its core program was rewritten, giving it a second form as an emotion-pulse bio handgun for intelligence missions. It embodies both peace envoy and weapon of conflict, and enjoys this dual role. As an emotion judge, its subjective nature makes it prone to emotional decisions in missions. So yes, as that text found on Lovegun's character card suggests, our first altmode is a pigeon. Or a dove, they're the same thing. That's the mode you'll find when you open the packaging, so it's a fine place to start. The bird is about 5½" from tail to beak, and the top of its head is more than 4" off the ground. It's just standing there calmly, with its wings folded back at its sides, but there is a bit of "articulation" that can be coaxed out of the joints that will eventually allow transformation - the top of the box even shows it saluting! The head is sculpted to look as though it's wearing a Captain America style helmet, complete with a little white emblem right on the forehead, so this is definitely leaning into the patriotic imagery. That feeling is defniitely helped by the colors, but more could have been done. The bird is primarily white and blue, but the next accent color is orange, rather than red. It still looks nice, and at a glance it reads as "American," but actual red would have been nicer. And we know that, because some of the parts we can see inside the bird in this mode are red, and they look really nice! There's some kind of stylized eagle logo on the chest, and below that, a pair of hearts with an arrow through them, an unexplained acronym reading "S.W.E.E.T." and the phrase "handle with care." When Hasbro does a triple-changer, the instructions generally go from one mode to the next: from robot to altmode A, and from altmode A to altmode B. In Lovegun's case, however, both sides of the instruction sheet start from bird mode. And you'll definitely want to follow them the first few times - Beast Box were already pretty complex, so adding a third mode pushes that even further. Everything is a lot of "fold this 90°, then rotate it 180° and fold it back to where it was," and that can get confusing. The second altmode is a gun. A robot that changes into a gun, and nobody's freaking out about it? Imagine that! This is where that orange from before comes into play, because they clearly needed it available for the tip of the barrel, and didn't want those future parts to be obtrusive, so they hid them by putting the same orange elsewhere. Not that anyone would be mistaking this for a real weapon, mind you: it's got a silver chamber, like a revolver, a square barrel, and a grip that's only large enough for two fingers. Not even the most scaredy-cat cop in the world would be able to convince a review board that he felt threatened by a black teenager holding this. It's 6¾" long and 3" tall, and although the way the bird head sticks off the back in place of the hammer is less than impressive, overall this is pretty good. Especially for something that was a bird two minutes before. The right side of the gun has a "Love & Peace" logo and ".357Magnum BeastBox Military" tampoed in black. Plus a dove logo behind the cylinder. Lovegun includes a clear plastic box the cube form can be stored in, just like Wandering Star had, though obviously this one needs to be bigger. Triple-changer Transformers have always been cool, so it's nice to see other companies taking a shot at them. A dove and a gun are a paradoxical combination, but both modes are decent, and the enginnering it took to get there is darn impressive. -- 07/07/26 What does S.W.E.E.T. stand for? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.