Battle Wheels
Johnny Lightning
by Dave McAwesomeNow THIS is the toy Hasbro should've made for the Transformers movie. Robots fighting robots? That's a win/win for me.
If aliens visited ancient Rome, you can bet Caesar would have kicked out the lions to make room for fighting robot warriors. Can you imagine the concession stand sales of foam robot fingers? The added boost to imperial coffers would have kept the empire afloat for at least an extra century.
Each robot has a number of removable parts that may be swapped with other robots for a base level of customization. The cool factor for me is that pieces of the robots can be knocked off in battle. The big rubber wheels function well on carpets in addition to bare floors.
I was a little disappointed in the controls. There are two levers. Each controls a wheel. You push both forward to move straight. I expected there to be something to move the arms. Moving one's arms is often considered a good thing during hand-to-hand (or robot-to-robot) combat. They don't move. You can adjust their position prior to battle, but that's it and they aren't very articulated.
Bart Swillington and I have a long-standing blood feud when it comes to combat toy sports. Crossbows and Catapults. Torpedo Run. G.I. Joe Cobra Battle Game. Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots. Bart took the orange/yellow one. I opted for green. (Up to six robots can fight at a time via multiband frequencies.) The orange one is Kagu-Tsuchi and has a samurai motif. The green one has a pony tail and the painfully obvious name Bashamon. I took great glee in shouting Bashamon as often as possible. Bart joked that Bashamon might be a Rastafarian name, and that ruined it for me. Rastafarians don't fight to the death with swirling blades of robotic fury. Neither of us could pronounce Bart's robot, so we called him Kurosawa. That didn't stick, and he was Hiroshima for the rest of the day.
We lined them up. Best of three. Fight on. The goal is to hit the dime-sized button at the center of the chest which pops the head off. One thing we quickly learned was that the arms of the robots kept getting knocked inwards towards the chest plate. After stopping a few times, we rotated the elbows around to prevent it from happening more often. We stared at each other. Neither of us scored a victory yet. Bashamon lost a shoulder plate, but that was it. We tried using the swords as lances, but they'd invariably get knocked away or towards the floor. This was hard work.
After a another colossal charge, we struck blood. Both heads popped off simultaneously. Like a couple of CSI, we crouched over the robots and examined the position they were in. I put on a Who album to get us into character. Fresh from our investigation, we repositioned our robots' arms and fired away. The secret is getting those arms just so. I lost 2-1, however, and scolded Bashamon for all the incentive money he lost from his pro contract. Bart and I were disappointed that the weapons didn't do much of anything, especially the maces.
After that, we started a new game. M.U.S.C.L.E. bowling. You set up 10 M.U.S.C.L.E.s (any small toy will work) and send the Battle Wheels down the pipe. We started keeping score, but because bowling has the most assified scoring rules, we began to inflate our points. "That's 6 M.U.S.C.L.E.s, plus I backed over 3 of them again so that counts double, plus I'm on a triple word score and I have your king in check. 97 points." Then we did combat bowling where one Battle Wheel had to knock down the M.U.S.C.L.E.s and the other had to protect them. It degenerated from there: I joked that there should be a sexualized version of Battle Wheels, Bart observed that there's something not quite right with me, and I agreed.
Batteries are included. So is a screwdriver to open the battery compartment (apparently, kids these days cannot be trusted to handle nine volts. Nice job, MySpace Generation.). The included screwdriver, unfortunately, is too small. I almost stripped one of the four screws (one for each robot, one for each controller). Thankfully, I'm not one of these latte-drinking, matching scarf-wearing, Grey Goose-ordering softies. I'm a man, dammit. I have tools. Not just the kind to slap together shoddy Ikea furniture either. Real tools. I got that screw out in no time. (P.S. Batteries and screwdriver are NOT, in fact, included with the individual robots. For shame, Johnny Lightning. Shame! Maybe they will if they ever sell a deluxe two-pack...which they should, hint, hint.)
Hail Caesar, robot gladiators.
