{"id":46998,"date":"2026-07-21T00:00:31","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T04:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/?p=46998"},"modified":"2026-07-21T06:45:31","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T10:45:31","slug":"transformers-age-of-the-primes-crosswise-and-rook-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/2026\/07\/transformers-age-of-the-primes-crosswise-and-rook-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Transformers Age of the Primes: Crosswise and Rook reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today's review of Age of the Primes<\/i> Sideways<\/a> conspicuously failed to mention his two Mini-Con partners, Crosswise and Rook. Because there's enough to say about them to warrant looking at them on their own.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Since Armada<\/i> came out after Pokemon<\/i>, it was given an entire fleet of tiny little beings for the characters to hunt and collect. The Mini-Cons would unlock new powers when paired with full-sized Transformers, and Sideways had two of them. Instead of turning into a miniscule vehicle or something, they each turned into a Headmaster<\/a>-style face, able to plug into his neck. And like the ones with the drop-down Tech Specs<\/a>, each of his heads would reveal him as either an Autobot or a Decepticon.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The gray one was Crosswise, and Sideways wearing that head was a Decepticon; the black one was Rook, and Sideways paired with him was an Autobot. They were both full, free-standing little robots, with joints typical for their size, and then they'd turn into heads with just a few steps and could be plugged into Sideways' neck, giving him three distinct looks.<\/p>\n

And now, 24 years later, we get this crap.<\/p>\n

Neither Crosswise nor Rook are complete robots: both of them get solid, unarticulated bodyparts that have to be removed for transformation. For Crosswise, it's the arms, and for Rook it's the legs. Those pieces have to be detached if you actually want to turn them into heads, which is embarrassingly bad. How do you mess up this colossally? The robot proportions already look like junk, with Crosswise having giant legs and a stumpy chest and head, and Rook being mostly good, except for the massive ape-arms. Turning them into heads is still simple, but it's easy to be simple when Step 1 is \"remove and discard half the figure.\" It also helps that both of them are blatantly \"a robot face that happens to have limbs sticking off it\" to begin with.<\/p>\n

Rather than the standard head pushing down into the torso, you have to fold it forward into the chest. That's easy enough, but the fact you have to open the chest - which first necessitates unhooking the arms so you can get the chest open far enough to get the head inside - is utterly amateur. Plus, having the bike kibble stick up so high behind the head means that the new head just tends to get lost, visually, meaning there's no real benefit to having them in that regard, either. Oh, and you want to change the chest symbol between Autobot and Decepticon when you swap the heads? Guess what, you get to unhook the arms again<\/b> to do it.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Oh, but don't worry, Crosswise and Rook can still combine into a third form, a rider for the motorcycle. Who doesn't have his own unique head, like the original toy did, but rather just uses Rook's. This one is as articulated as it should be, thanks to both of the Mini-Cons donating all their wokrable joints to be half his total, but at only x\" tall, he's proportionally smaller compared to the bike than the 2002 version was, and so now he looks like a toddler sitting in the seat instead of an actual rider. What an utter waste.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The immobile limbs you had to remove can be stored on the sides of the motorcycle, in the most \"we put no thought into this\" effort imaginable, or you can plug them together in an extremely loose approximation of the \"weapon modes\" the toys had at the turn of the century... not that Sideways can hold it in any possible way, since there's no peg sized for his hand. Maybe pretend it's another, even shorter and less poseable robot?<\/p>\n

Just like with Nexus Prime<\/a>, there's no excuse for releasing any Transformer<\/i> this half-assed. At least in Nexus' case we know it was because they waited until the last minute to do him instead of starting right away, but Sideways, Crosswise, and Rook don't even get that excuse. Like we said in the main review, their engineering was already solved, a quarter century ago; all Hasbro had to do was take what already existed and refine it, not reinvent it from scratch. These three are useless junk and not worth your time or money.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<i>And now, some more OAFEry:<\/i><\/H5>