Sideswipe's vehicle mode is, like on the other "mainline" releases of this character, simply amazing. The Corvette Centennial is already an incredibly slick, awesome-looking vehicle, but adding a nice coat of shiny silver paint over the whole thing and THEN giving him transparent headlights, tail lights, and windows just really makes him shine. Like other Human Alliance toys, he's got two seats inside, with a "real" steering wheel and room for the Human Alliance human figures. Pegs near the top of the seats correspond with peg holes in the back of the human figures' backs to ensure they stay in there at least semi-securely. There's no robot mode extras in this mode whatsoever, which is of course an awesome plus. And, though his color scheme isn't exactly very varied what with being so predominantly silver/gray and all, it still looks good with all that paint, and the transparent blue and red provide excellent contrast colors. One additional cool feature is that Sideswipe's car doors lift up, not out, which is accurate to the vehicle. Unfortunately, this leads me to my lone complaint about this mode-- the ball joints these car doors are on tend to come undone rather easily during transformation back into car mode, and it's quite difficult to snap the balljoints back in where they're supposed to be once they come loose. Tech Sergeant Epps, for his part, is a pretty decent mock-up of the person in question and has the same articulation and proportions that most of the other Human Alliance "partner" figures have-- basically the movement of some of the smaller GIJOE figures.
    Sideswipe's robot mode, sadly, is definitely an afterthought and took a distant backseat to the vehicle mode. Practically his entire car mode hangs off his back, with the exception of the wheels and part of his rear bumper. It doesn't really peg in anywhere either, and having that much of a backpack definitely makes him a bit unsteady. Luckily, his feet are a bit wider here than on most other versions of him, so in a fairly straight position he can stand well enough, but you can't get very creative. As far as articulation goes, he can move at the neck, shoulders (at two points), elbows (at two points), the wrists, at the base of each thumb, at the base of his two fingers on each hand (as one piece), and at the hips (technically at two points, though only one of them is functional-- more on that later) and knees. Basically his arms you can get a good amount of movement out of, but the rest of his body can't move worth squat. His lower legs are on a slide-out mechanism and can only bend backwards at the knees, while at his hips, he can move them sideways. As far as moving them forward to backward, they CAN move in that direction, but these stupid rubber "tendons" connecting them to his waist prevent his legs from staying in that position-- plus, if you move them more than a little forward or backward, the tendons have a tendency to actually rip out of their sockets, and it can take a lot of effort (and warping the plastic some) to put them back into their holes. REALLY bad, irritating design, there. I wish I could stop there, but Sideswipe also has practically no real mass to his stomach and waist to speak of-- it's a thin line that's beyond anorexic. Two TINY fold-out panels on the sides of his stomach are supposed to help alleviate this problem, but they really don't do that. At all. As far as features, Epps (or another Human Alliance partner figure) can sit in either of Sideswipe's car seats behind his shoulders, with a small non-firing gun in front of the right seat while the left seat can convert into a spring-loaded missile launcher. By twirling the wheels on the back of Sideswipe's lower arms, you can also have his hands and blades twirl around, though it's an incredibly weird-looking gimmick. Thankfully, simply by sliding the hand/blade assembly on each arm into a locked position, you can stop the odd motion. The blades are a bit wimpy though when compared to other toys of the character-- and the fact that these blades are made of rubbery, bendy plastic don't really help to alleviate that image much either. Finally, the middle of Sideswipe's face can fold up to reveal, um... another mouth, as far as I can tell. It's not like he has a battle mask like Bumblebee or Prime or anything. Interesting, but kind of a useless feature there.
    Although I hate to say it due to his incredible, amazing-looking vehicle mode, Human Alliance Sideswipe is easily the weakest of the RotF Human Alliance figures, with an incredibly poor robot mode that basically has the entire car mode on the back, plus generally weak gimmicks and poor articulation along with bad body proportions. Get the cheaper deluxe version instead.

Review by Beastbot

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