>>7656976I have a soft spot for bikes but I overall don't care much for vehicles unless they have a pilot. I think they suffered from being too small as sets, since you couldn't place a pilot to ride them. I never got Boss,so maybe his size allowed him to be more interesting.
I will say this though. The box art was some of the weirdest and creative stuff I had ever seen Lego pull out and as a kid I was dismayed we couldn't get those monsters and pilots as sets instead. But that's beyond the point.
The point is that the concept and art behind Roboriders was actually pretty good and looking at it you can tell it was one the very last Lego themes you could see and think "Yep, this was totally made in the 90s". Even 01 Bionicle was on its way of normalizing constraction, opting for less weird looking sets and color schemes. Slizers/Throwbots and Roboriders were 100% 90s insanity (for better or for worse).
I want to focus Onyx and Dust (and Boss) because they have some of the coolest.. "art direction"? I've ever seen in constraction. By that I mean the whole concept, from the design to the color scheme to the world shown in the box art.
Onyx was a spooky black/grey robot with blood red eyes, laser guns (?) and GiTD wheels, making his way through a hellish nightmarescape of a cave.
Dust was a Mad Max esque MFer with mean knives and a simple but good color scheme Bionicle never really used. The desert he was cruising on was terrifying, some of the scariest art I've seen on a Lego theme.
Boss was weird as fuck too, from the color scheme to the concept itself.
The other 4 were nothing new, just slightly different iterations of concepts Slizers/Throwbots already explored. Shame on me for buying those for the minifig weapons recolors. Dust, Onyx (and Boss) clearly were the MVPs of the line, the only ones who actually brought something new. I wish Bionicle took a page or two from them, at least for Bara Magna. We got rainbow gladiators instead.
