Still good?

The Studio Series Sidewipe is upon us. Will he make the OG Deluxe Sideswipe look like a bucket of BB lubricant? Will he leave his predecessor in the dust? Will he make you want to convulse and throw up when looking at the figure from 2009?

I dunno. I don’t have the Studio Series figure yet, and I’ve only seen the stock images.

But I’ve had this figure for years, so let’s take a look at him!

Vehicle Mode

The car mode looks great. It’s molded very nicely, hides his robot mode well and has a lot of nice paint. Even for an ROTF figure this guys paint is amazing.

With the good out of the way, he has a couple of problems in vehicle mode. The first thing is the panels that break up the otherwise beautiful car mode.

The second is that he needs transformed juuuuust right to get him to roll properly. That said it can be done.

Nice looking, but sometimes hard to play with car mode.

Transformation

Pretty simple and kinda shellformer-y. But it’s an enjoyable conversion process that’s pretty straightforward and shorthand.

It doesn’t count as automorph since this is an ROTF figure, but pegging his chest in pushes his head up and completes the robot mode. Neat throwback.

Robot Mode

First off he looks great and is really show accurate for a first attempt at the design.

Problem is, he has really limited posabilty and his feet give him horrible, horrible balance. He has no bicep swivel, no wrist swivel, no waist swivel and no thigh swivels. Really? All of the budget must have gone to his paint.

He’s a bit of a shellformer, with most of the car folded up on his back. You can arrange it in a variety of ways for aesthetic or balance purposes. Maybe the budget for joints all went to the panels instead?

Like his alt mode, he’s good looking, but a bit of a problematic toy.

Gimmicks

Mech Alive. ROTFs line wide gimmick that fans still either love or hate. Sideswipe has two.

The first gimmick are the swords on both his arms. Moving one half of one of his arm mounted blades automatically moves the other half. Meaning the swords don’t flop around no matter what position his arms are in. Pretty great built in weapon solution.

The second gimmick is more defensive. He has kneepads that move in and out when you bend his knees. They look like fingernails that grow quickly. Yeah, not so exciting, but not that bad and can be ignored pretty easily.

Toy or collectible?

As a toy, he’s good. He looks cool, has swords and armor pieces to mess around with. However, his sometimes not rolling car mode and lack of posability hurt his fun factor.

As a collectible, he looks good on a shelf. But with the Studio Series Deluxe coming out, that might be gone for him pretty soon.

Closing

Honestly, this figure was already surpassed by the Sidearm Sideswipe mold. The Studio Series mold is supposed to blow that one out of the water. That means this guy is probably gonna get blown off the race track twice.

He’s not a bad figure though. I have had fun with him and you probably would too. It’s just most people don’t need or want two of the same character in their collection. But if you wanna experience the mold and don’t want to own two of the same character there is a solution. You can always get his red repaint, Swerve.