Posted July 21, 2012 at 10:40 pm
Still not sure how I should attack the individual members of Bruticus here.  Individually?  In groups?  Ah well.  Let's try Swindle and see how that works out.

Swindle's the simplest of the Fall of Cybertron Combaticons and the most like the original Scramble City-style combiner components.  His vehicle mode is a brick, it transforms pretty standardly into robot mode (hood folds down into chest, rear of vehicle folds out into legs, robot arms pull from the sides), and his leg and arm modes are basically bricks as well.  This isn't a knock on him!  It's actually kind of nice.  The rest of the limbs go through crazy gymnastics to get into each mode, so Swindle is like a mini-vacation from them.  Want to go from vehicle mode to leg mode?  Stand it up on its ass!  Want to go from leg mode to arm mode?  Flip out one of the hands!

And, yeah, he can do both the left and the right arm.  There's a differently-thumbed fist inside each robot mode leg.  The fist is sculpted in a relaxed position with a 5mm peghole in there.

If there's a downside to him, it's his robot mode shoulders.  I wish they folded upwards more!  As-is, his shoulders are kinda slumpy.  He's also one of the biggest robot modes of the set of five (tied with Onslaught), which is kind of odd for Swindle, who should be the smallest, but it makes sense considering how no-nonsense his transformation is.  He's efficient.  (His size'll work out pretty well when this mold is later used for Roadbuster.)

Apparently a few people have broken the tabs that connect the halves of his vehicle mode together more securely?  This is not something I have experienced, but folks should be careful.

Oh, and maybe I should talk about the combiner connector ports.  They're very similar, to my recollection, to the original Scramble City-style connectors, but without using the heads of the robots.  Onslaught has four block-shaped pegs on him, and each of the limbs has a connector piece that snaps around those blocks.   The connector piece isn't one solid mechanism, but a claptrap of different walls of plastic that close around the block.  It takes some force to remove and connect the limbs, which is probably a good thing.

If I could change one thing about the toy, it's that I'd put a peghole on his right robot mode arm so I could mount his gun on there cartoon-style.

This is your chance to get all your Fred Willard jokes out of your system.
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