Dave's Human Alliance Rant Wave 2 Sideswipe with Tech Sergeant Epps Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/RotF/HA2 The Human Alliance figures are being doled out one at a time, merged in with older figures, so each new one ends up being shortpacked at least at first, although there's likely also some "all one figure" cases later on. So far, though, as of the third figure (Skids with Mikaela) they're not releasing more than one new set at a time. CAPSULE Sideswipe with Tech Sergeant Epps: Very nice vehicle mode, but the transformation is a shellmaster with some frustrating tolerance issues, and the robot mode is unstable in part because of the huge car shell hanging off the back. Mildly recommended if you don't factor in price, neutral if you do. $29.99 at Target. RANT Packaging: Same as Bumblebee's in general, but of course with photos of the two new characters on front and sides. The backdrop scenery is of the Shanghai fight, with Sideways in robot mode in the background. Sideswipe is all closed up, although Epps is posed as if his outstretched hand should be resting on an open door. (By contrast, Skids has his doors open, and Mikaela does look like she's holding one open.) The photos on the back show robot mode with Epps riding in the backpack over the left shoulder, with an inset showing him over the right shoulder operating a little gun. The vehicle mode shows the driver's side door swung up and open, with Epps sitting inside. The cosell on the bottom is for Bumblebee with Sam. The callouts on the back are "Human ally rides on shoulder!" "Spinning Arm Blades!" "Epps Figure mans shoulder cannon!" and "Human allies ride inside (additional figures sold separately)!" Again, I've seen no indication that there will be figure packs of just the humans. Epps is held into his halfshell by a single rubber band and the shell being taped closed over his feet. Two twist-ties hold Sideswipe in place, no rubber bands. AUTOBOT: SIDESWIPE Altmode: Corvette Stingray Concept Licensor: GM Previous Name Use: G1, G2, Alternators, Armada, Universe2 Previous Mold Use: None Mech Alive: Spinning blades (not labeled as Mech Alive, but it's that sort of thing) Function: Warrior Motto: "What's that on the ground there? Oh, it's your arm." When SIDESWIPE arrived on Earth, he was a raw, untrained fighter, used to battling alone and outnumbered. He was teamed with Epps as the Tech Sergeant could whip him into shape as an effective member of the strike team led by IRONHIDE. The two have become good friends. In combat, Epps' [sic] combat-hardened instincts direct the speed and cunning of SIDESWIPE with devastating effectiveness. STR 8 INT 7 SPD 8 END 6 RNK 5 COUR 7 FRB 3 SKL 9 Avg 6.625 Of course, in the comics he's a combat-hardened loner who's already trained under Ironhide, and the Robot Replicas version is a well-trained gladitorial competitor who trained for years. So not so much "raw, untrained fighter" in other versions. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, so clearly Hasbro is prejudiced against hobgoblins. Vehicle Mode: A sleek, silver Corvette Stingray that does a fairly good job of minimizing panel lines. Pretty much everything except the windows and tires is either made of powder silver plastic or covered in powder silver paint. Like Bumblebee, the side mirrors are more like blades, and barely have enough mirror surface to show anything to the driver. It has a split rear window in homage to the 1963 Stingray, and the brake discs are fully molded inside the wheels, a typical Alternators detail. The tires are hard plastic rather than rubber, though. Just a hair over 7" long (18cm), I still can't dig up a proper length for the car, and Wikicars.com's entry is still nearly blank. It's probably the same 1:27 scale as Bumblebee, though. Most of the outer shell seems to be made of a powdery metallic silver plastic, with black plastic wheels. The roof piece, inner door parts and windshield are made of clear blue-gray plastic (the outside of the lower door is silvery plastic, but if you open the door you can see the entire inner surface is clear). Colorless clear plastic is used for the headlights, exhaust pipes and probably the taillights. The brake discs are a dark brownish gray plastic. Inside, the seats and steering wheel are very dark gray plastic, the dashboard is the same plastic as the brake discs. Much of the roof and other clear bits are painted silver in a very good match to the silver plastic (to the extent that I wonder if the silver plastic is really gray plastic that's been 100% painted). There's opaque bright blue paint on the backside of the headlights, and clear red paint on the taillights. The front grille is black and the molded Corvette flag logo is painted in black and red. The wheel hubs are painted silver, and the brakepads are red. The molded Stingray logos on the sides and back are unpainted (or, at least, only painted the same silver as the rest of their general area), and while there's a molded license plate area, it's also unpainted. The doors open gull style, swinging up at their hinges rather than out, and a tab at the back end of the door keeps it pretty securely in place when closed. In fact, it takes a bit of flexing to get the door open. Inside, there's a bucket seat on each side and a full dashboard complete with steering wheel, but a bunch of stuff goes down the middle between the seats, including the stored missile, lessening the effect of having a detailed interior. The seats fold forward, but the passenger seat has a missile launcher stuck to the back of it. Ground clearance is nearly zero, with the robot thighs dragging on the ground. The wheels spin freely, but the dragging thighs keep the toy from rolling well. Transformation: Rather shellmaster-y, almost the entire car body shell lifts away on a single strut at the start of transformation, only the rear fenders remaining to form part of the chest. Everything else about the robot is curled up inside the shell. The telescoping legs are interesting, although they also lead to lack of articulation. You'll need very strong nails or a knife to deploy the waist pieces he has folded up along the sides of his pelvis. Speaking of his pelvis, the bottom section of it has pegs to lock it together, but the only "out to the sides" articulation of his hips requires unpegging these, so I'm not sure why they even bothered. Mind you, putting the legs out to the sides runs smack into the fact that the feet don't really snap together solidly. In the end, the only thing I needed to check the instructions for in going to robot mode was the specific configuration of the wheelfoot supports, although I suppose they might have also told me about the pelvis flaps and the fact that the upper arms need to be flipped over before I figured it out myself in later play. :) The instructions aren't clear on one point, though, the struts that are under the doors in vehicle mode do peg into spots on the roof to keep the huge backpack together. Getting it back to vehicle mode is INCREDIBLY fussy. Several parts have to be flexed to allow for clearance, making for likely breakage points later on. Things fit so tightly that if anything is even slightly out of position you'll have to go backwards several steps to get it back in the right place. The main trouble area is the rear, and the arms have to be forced past the fenders every time you need to take them out to adjust something. There's a practically guaranteed "head pops off" moment you'll run into, too, as you have to force the head through a small gap to let the shoulders come together. At least it's easy to stow the missile after the fact, just lift up the roof piece and swivel it out of the way so you can put the missile in its slot. When you're finally done with getting everything mostly in place, you'll need to do a little panel-massaging to get it all snapped into place. Robot Mode: It's basically Sideswipe's Robot Replica with a car shell on his back. If you ignore the massive backpack, it looks pretty good, though, and you can remove most of the offending bits with a screwdriver if you want to. As with the Deluxe version, there's rubberized "suspension" pieces connecting the pelvis to the thighs. They can be popped out. I am told they are devilishly difficult to pop back IN, so I'm not going to test the pop-out part. 7" (18cm) tall at the head, the missile launcher can be posed a couple centimeters higher up, and the backpack kibble sticks up a few millimeters above the head. Mainly silver and various shades of gray to black, with a couple tiny splashes of red and blue. It's a little clearer in this mode which pieces are molded silver and which are painted silver, but there's still several pieces I'd have to disassemble or even scrape at with a knife to be sure, so some of the pieces I call silver plastic may actually be painted. The head, upper arms, forearms, abdomen front and thigh fronts are silver. The elbows, feet (absent the wheels in the middle), spine and several little joint pieces are a dark grey-brown plastic. The lower legs, fingers, thumbs and chest core are medium gray plastic. The wrists, foot-fenders (little tabs over the fronts of the wheelfeet), pelvis flaps and some other little connectors are light gray. The right shoulder gun, main body of the missile launcher and human seats are very dark gray plastic. The wheels are black. The arm blades and the pelvis-to-hip suspension connectors are rubbery dark gray-brown plastic. The head's lightpiping is colorless clear plastic, and the missile is a slightly swirly and faintly metallic light gray plastic. In short, there's a LOT of "different" plastic colors here, but under casual inspection it looks almost monochrome. A redeco could go totally nuts with colors if they wanted. Aside from some places that might be painted silver, there's not a lot of paint specific to this mode. The eyes are painted transparent blue, and there's a gray Cybertronian glyph tattoo over the left eye. There's a small Autobot symbol printed at the center of the chest, and a molded Corvette flags logo on the abdomen is painted black and red. The clear red on the taillights adds a little more color to this mode. The head turns, the waist does not, and most of the limited articulation of the legs is of the "why bother?" variety because he can't stand up if you depart too far from the "straight legs, feet spread slightly" pose. The hips swing apart on a transformation hinge as mentioned above, and swivel forward and back, but the suspension pieces make sure they snap back to neutral. There's a slight wiggle-room joint in place of a proper thigh swivel. The knees bend some, but the ankles don't bend...the little bits of heel spur articulation doesn't make up for that since the joints aren't that tight and the surface areas of support are minimal. So, functionally speaking, if you want it to stand unsupported, you really only get to choose how far apart the legs are, all other movements lead to falling over. The shoulders are universal joints plus a little more wiggle room due to a transformation joint, and the swivel is ratcheting. There's a smooth swivel above each hinge elbow. The wrists turn, the thumbs and two-finger chunks are hinged. His shoulder missile launcher is on a three-hinged strut and elevates through a full range, but it can't turn. Other than the missile launcher (something no other version of Sideswipe has, considering he's supposed to be pretty much melee-only), his main gimmick is spinning his blades around. If you click the hand down into gear (it's a slider at the wrist), then turning the tire on the forearm will rotate the wrist. One turn of the wheel turns the wrist twice, so it's not really "spinning" in the sense we normally think of. Undocumented feature: the roof piece has a handle on it that seems to serve no purpose, given that the roof doesn't seem to be removable...the rivet attaching it has a spring inside and there's an extra hinge for the roof so it can be moved around a lot without removing it, in fact. Given that the hands aren't in any position to hold a shield, the handle is probably intended to slide over a blade. [Later note: his battle mask can slide up and reveal an ugly face underneath. Be careful with it, it's a rather thin piece of plastic.] Human Attachment: Getting Epps inside the car is rather difficult, there's not as much space in there as in Bumblebee. But it can be done, and he'll even peg onto the seatback if you're patient. In robot mode, he can sit in either car seat, although the passenger side one can't be used for the missile launching function when he's in it. There's no arm mounting or hand pegs. There's a secondary cannon that stows behind the head and can be flipped out to be operated by a human sitting in the right shoulder seat. The secondary cannon is on a universal joint, but the horizontal traverse is limited by the robot head getting in the way. It can aim off to the right, but not to the left. Tech Sergeant Epps: In case anyone's curious, Tech Sergeant is a rank that currently only exists in the Air Force (among the US military branches) and is the second hardest rank to get into...but not the second highest rank. I guess some people just get promoted past it. 2.5" (6.3cm) tall, he's taller than Sam, but not enough taller to be 1:27 scale. I found a range of about four inches in the heights listed for Tyrese Gibson, but even at the low end Epps has a helmet on that would bump his height up. The figure's proportions are a little wonky, with overly long legs. His expression is somewhere between neutral and mild fear. Most of the figure is made of medium gray plastic, with the joints being olive drab. The head is either made of brown plastic, or they painted up into the neck hole. The hands (and maybe the face) are painted brown, his eyes are white with black pupils, the lenses of the goggles on his helmet are very light blue. Olive drab paint makes camo patterns on most of the figure, leaving his boots and weapons unpainted. Articulation is identical to Sam's, but the molded kneepads make it a little harder to rotate the peg part of the knee joint. He has peg holes on his back and in his feet, so he can stand in Bumblebee's hand even though there's no place for a foot peg on Sideswipe. Overall: It's very nice in car mode, but it's a finicky shellmaster with a robot mode that barely has useful leg articulation. If this were a $20 toy it might be worth picking up, but it's just not good enough to drop $30 on. Not only is it not three times better than the Deluxe version, it's arguably not any amount better, other than in vehicle mode. I'll probably display it in vehicle mode, not only because it's the stronger mode, but also because I don't look forward to having to remember all the transformation tricks in a few months when he gets cycled into storage. :) Dave Van Domelen, spurred to start this review by the fact that he found Skids/Mikaela/Arcee.