WE'VE ACHIEVED SOMETHING: the it's walky! kickstarter has funded

Swoop is the second of two Dinobots available in the first wave of Power of the Primes Deluxe Class guys.  And y'know what?  He is pretty great!

I mean, Slug's okay.  He's an awkward-looking triceratops (which can be mitigated somewhat by creative transformation) who is, essentially, just the original Slag toy but with knees.  There's not a lot new there, other than the obvious "oh there's a combiner port hidden in me so I can become an arm for a giant robot."  

But Swoop does something important for me.  Sure, he, too, is pretty damn similar to his original toy, but with knees.  But his pterosaur mode has articulated legs.  This means you can swing them under his body, so he can stand up and perch properly -- or you can swing them back, and they can dangle behind him for flight.  Transformers pterosaurs rarely bother with giving you the choice, choosing to mold the feet in place one way or the other.  But being given the option really opens up Swoop to me.  

You might notice that Swoop has a blue chest instead of red.  This was a later change to the toy, since the promo images still had him in toy- (and comic-)accurate red.  But I guess Hasbro decided they wanted him to have a blue chest, like in the cartoon.  Ultimately, swapping the chest color and nothing else actually resulted in a kind of Diaclone-style Swoop. (Diaclones were the Japanese toys which Hasbro imported/localized as Transformers.)  Cartoon Swoop had a fully red helmet, while the Diaclone toy had a... blue front and a red back?  The black front and the red back on this Power of the Primes toy feels more Diacloney than cartoony.

I generally trend towards Marvel comics colors, but I'm okay with a blue Swoop.  It's nice to have a little variety, color-wise, plus I've decided that only the dinosaurs in the Dinobots get to be red-chested.  Swoop is not a dinosaur, so he gets a different color.  

Once again, Swoop comes with a combiner fist which the packaging prioritizes as chest armor.  The chest armor is supposed to house a Prime Master (sold separately), but since Prime Masters are cross-compatible with Titan Masters, it means you can plug a Titan Master head into the same spot.  Since there was a (renamed) Swoop Titan Master, you can totally have Swoop wearing a giant fist-smock with his own head embedded in it, kind of if he were piloted by Krang.

The instructions do not tell you how to connect the chest armor to his chest, and there's no obvious 5mm peghole there.  What you have to do is use the tabs on the inside of each of the combiner fist's thumbs to fit into slots on each side of the pterosaur head.  

There's also a sword for Swoop to hold, and a smaller peg on the sword for it to be used to stow in non-robot modes.  The only real good place to stow it is underneath the pterosaur beak.  It's not a GREAT place.  But it's slightly better than one of the other two compatible pegholes under his abdomen.

The only real complaint I have about POTP Swoop is that the front of the pterosaur face doesn't plug well into the back of its skull for beast mode.  It tends to kind of droop out.  I'd use some floor polish to make it a more solid connection, but, well, his robot mode face is kinda in there.  eehhh