Big Bad Toy Store got in the Combaticon wave of Combiner Wars Deluxes, so let's talk about one of them, why not.  I'm glad the Combaticons are in the second half of the line, because we just kind of got them a few years ago, combining and all, in the Fall of Cybertron toyline.  There's a little deja vu involved.  When Hasbro dips into the Combiners well, the Combaticons tend to be what gets pulled up first, because they're one of those rare early teams that were an interesting variety of vehicles, rather than "all jets" or "all sportscars," and so it's kind of nice that they got to sit out the first few rounds this time.

This is Swindle!   I like him.  He's a drastic retool of the Protectobot Rook.  Like, super drastic, to the point that he's really just a guy who transforms in the same pattern but becomes a differently-sculpted robot and vehicle.  He shares, like, a crotch and thighs probably and maybe some other structural stuff, but the rest is all new.  But, as mentioned, he transforms the same.  "Roof" of the car goes on his back, legs form the lower half of the front, the arms fold up into the back.  Rook was a good toy, and so is he.  

And it's just nice that Swindle gets his own danged head, you know?  Of all the "guys who transform into limbs for larger guys" from the original Transformers, he's arguably the one dude who stood on his own, character wise.  And so he's important in a way a lot of the other Combiner Wars dudes are not.  And yet Hasbro, half the time, tends to get his head wrong.  Swindle has these adorably large eyes, right?  He's a con man who's adorable.  That's kind of his thing.  But the Alternators toy was really just Trailbreaker in tan, and then his Fall of Cybertron toy... I guess copied that head instead?  It didn't really look like Swindle at all.  But here's the wide-eyed combining Swindle toy you wanted.  Finally.

You can plug his cannon into his arm like he had it in the original cartoon, if you want.  That's also cool.

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.