Scourge

Oh, "Scourge" like Robots in Disguise, not "Scourge" like the bathtub. I get it now! Scourge and the Terrorcons face off against the Autobots in a battle for the Transwarp Key. This figure was allegedly released in 2023, but you wouldn't know that from looking for it: for comparison's sake, he should have come out sometime between Sludge and Snarl, but no stores carried it in any appreciable numbers, meaning it functionally didn't exist. Believe me, it's not by choice that we only have one Rise of the Beasts review so far. There was a theory, before the movie opened, that RotB Scourge was going to be revealed to be Optimus Prime, corrupted by Unicron and either sent back from the future or jumping over from the original Bayverse continuity. That certainly would have been more interesting than what we got ("he's... just some guy?"), but wouldn't have really made much sense, so it was never the plan. If anything, the fact he wears a metal mask to conceal his unknown face makes him feel more like Tarn than anything else. Scourge's proportions are really weird. Like, he's got this massively wide neck, then his shoulder sit low on the torso, lower than they do on the actual movie reders. (Like many movie toys, this is based on concept art rather than the final design, due to how long it takes to make and produce toys.) He's got chains wrapped around his arm, leg, and chest, to show how much of a badassatron he is. There's faux kibble in the sculpt, like the halves of a fifth wheel hitch on his thighs, which seems to sit above parts of an engine block? There's a gigantic blade mounted under his right arm, and instead of a normal hand, his left arm ends in a giant, narrow, four-pronged claw. The claw arm can be removed at the elbow, and replaced with a chunky blaster. Similarly, the blade under the other arm is mounted on a hinge that allows it to swing up and become a handheld weapon. All the joints in his legs are very stiff and clackity, even though the figure isn't really so heavy that you'd think they'd need it. The neck has a balljoint at the top and bottom, though it's so wide there really isn't some huge range of motion; plain swivels would have worked just as well. The four fingers of his claw only have a hinge where they meet the hand, not in the middle anywhere, so you can't actually pose them threateningly. There's some kind of molding error with the left thigh that makes the leg pop off the joint whenever my figure moves there, which is kind of annoying since turning the legs around is one step in the conversion. Scourge's altmode is a semi-truck, because of course it is - that's how Nemesis Primes work. We've been getting Transformers semi trucks for literal decades now, but this conversion is clever and inventive, with things we've never seen before. Love that! The way the cab flattens out against his back minimizes what would usually be a huge piece of kibble, the smokestacks tilting individually instead of as one is cool, the front end coming together from both his shoulders and his back is interesting, and the way the grille moves from his chest to the front of the truck in one solid piece is a unique idea. There are a lot of hinged arms to move various pieces around, so it can be hard to get the hang of how far each of them are supposed to be folded out, especially since some of those joints are so stiff that it barely feels like they're meant to move at all. Because Bumblebee and Rise of the Beasts finally allowed Optimus Prime to be the kind of truck he always should have been, Scourge is free to inherit Bayverse Prime's Peterbilt altmode (part of what contributed to the "he secretly is Prime" speculation). As a large, grungy truck with trophies attached to its front end, it feels like a reference to Steven Spielberg's Duel - it's just that inctead of license plates from cars he's driven off the road, Scourge's trophies are faction symbols ripped directly from the Transformers he's killed. A bunch of those are sculpted on the front rille, though the robot didn't have any of the ones on his arms. One way you can tell this is based on the concept art rather than the production truck is the armored frame over the front: the real thing has perfectly horizontal bars, while the ones here are angled down toward the center, something that makes them vaguely resemble a Decepticon logo (despite the fact Scourge is a Terrorcon, instead). There are armored slats over the windshield, and all the windows (and consequently part of the hood) are molded from translucent orange plastic. They've attempted to paint rust on the surface of the truck, but it ends up just looking like stray yellow streaks. The robot's blaster splits in half and attaches to the rear bed of the truck. It looks pretty bad, but the real vehicle had a snow plow or something that it carried there, and that's what this is trying to replicate. In the movie, Scourge had a couple of little Frenzy-style guys who do his bidding, and Hasbro did make Core Class versions of those. They're both the same mold, and both turn into a gun that can be mounted on top of this kibble. When Michael Bay's Transformers movies were bad, they were at least bad in interesting or laughable ways; Rise of the Beasts, meanwhile, wasn't bad, but it also wasn't any good; it was flat and lifeless, with mid-tier action, a straightforward script, a final battle in a big, nondescript, grey wasteland... that could describe basically any Hollywood action movie, and without Bay's distinctive visual flair, there's nothing special about it. Scourge is a fun figure though, with some inventive engineering, but he'd be a lot more exciting if we hadn't already had Mad Max Megatron two movies prior. -- 10/27/26 Where would you rank Rise of the Beasts? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.