This might seem like a strange reason to buy a toy but the Cybertron/Galaxy Force line really grabbed me as a whole, and I didn't want to miss out on a fun toy, even if it didn't appeal to me straight away.
Vehicle Mode:
So, yes, it's a yellow construction vehicle, but seemingly not a G2/EU Constructicon homage because there's lots of brown, red and bluish-grey present as well. If anything, the colourscheme is closer to that of the Energon Constructicon Bonecrusher. He has six massive tyres - four at the back, doubling up for extra support - a large and semi-functional scoop at the front, and a removeable piledriver (also the robot's weapon) mounted on the back.
Sculpted detail is surprisingly sparse, and frequently located in strange places. For example, the back of the vehicle features a raised box - acting as the piledriver's mounting - with a grille in the top and several cables leading out of it, with a large vent on the angled protrusion from the rear, much of which is obscured to one degree or another while the weapon is present. The sides are then mostly bare until wheel level, at which point there are scuplted vents and grilles on each side, mostly concealed by the presence of the wheels. There's even sculpted detail on the inside faces of the front wheels' mudguards, which only becomes visible during transformation.
The main feature on each side of the vehicle is a large ladder, sculpted in two parts, while the cab is partly hidden behind the bulky arms of the scoop. The only piston details are right behind the scoop, and both the remaining sculpted detail and the arrangements of joints on the arms mean it's fairly obvious that the scoop's arms are also the robot's arms. Behind the scoop, the robot's thighs and knees are fairly obvious, flanking a groin chunk with a small grille sculped into the front.
The scoop gets a generous coat of red paint on the back, though I can't understand why the paint application is shaped the way it is, leaving a trapezoid shape unpainted in the middle. It would have made more sense to have followed the sculpted panel lines at the top, which may also have disguised the fuzzy, splotchy edges of the paint application on mine. On the upside, there's a nice bit of dry-brushing of silver paint on the teeth, giving it a weathered and well-used look, since the paint has been added to both sides of the scoop.
Even leaving aside that the cab is largely hidden behind the arms, there's not much to it - windows at the sides only because the front is open due to a small element of his transformation. There are stubby wing mirrors on each side, a couple of small lights at the front of the roof, and larger ones mounted toward the rear, just in front of his exhaust pipes.
Curiously, Landmine's key-activated gimmick is, I think, the only one in the line which cannot be properly deployed in vehicle mode. The key slot is available and the blades can be physically deployed from between his rear wheels... but then he can't roll properly, and it's not as if blades sprouted from his wheels would be much use to him anyway, unless he wanted to work in farming rather than construction.
The weapon - that weirdly long piledriver - looks pretty good in terms of its own sculpted detail, and it's spring-loaded to launch the hammer... But it strikes me as strange that it's mounted pointing backwards rather than down at the ground. Given the length of the hammer, though, it'd have to be mounted slightly higher than the back of the vehicle to even function. The paintwork here is also a little untidy, with overspray on one side and patchiness on the other... Honestly, though, it's nice to see a weapon accessory with its own paintwork, as it's such a rarity these days. The missile doesn't fire very far, and the trigger is more difficult to fire than many similar launchers, as it has to be tilted back rather than simply pushed down.
Robot Mode:
Landmine makes for a pretty odd-looking robot. At first glance, he's very boxy - just about the only parts of him that aren't made wholly of right angles are his forearms, but they only feature quite a subtle angle. They also have the two halves of his vehicle mode's scoop hanging off them in a way that must surely be inconvenient for walking around - particularly through doorways - or, y'know, using his arms to do anything. I guess he's useful for carrying things around, so long as he keeps his forearms tilted just enough to prevent spillages, and having large - potentially armoured - panels easily available makes for good defense... but it also seems like wasteful and ill-considered design for what's meant to be a sentient alien robot. Then again, I guess no-one ever made an argument for 'intelligent design' on Cybertron...
And, while Landmine appears very boxy from the front, he's certainly not as flat as some figures. The vehicle mode cab protrudes quite a way out down the middle of the torso, with its roof lights at the top, while the group of exhaust pipes is split up and folded back over his shoulders. There's even a new crotch piece that folds out of the front of the cab, via a chunky tab on each side, to fill in what would otherwise be an awkward overhang below his waist. The entire back end of the vehicle is flattened out to a degree and hangs off his shoulders like a bulky, wheeled cape. Additionally, while his legs appear comparatively slim from the front - bulking out toward the bottom thanks to the vehicle's front wheels and their mudguards - the lower legs are deeper than they are wide, and the heel spur actually extends a little further back than the wheels.
The only paintwork unique to robot mode is on his shins - red across the top and down the central raised details, black covering the recessed grille-like panels at the top. Neither the thighs nor the arms have any paintwork at all, which is all the more strange in the case of the latter, as they have screws in the fronts of them. It's a very strange choice in the way the toy is made, and feels like a real mistake, as it would surely have been better to spoil the vehicle mode with visible screws. Failing that, some paint on the shoulder armour or the forearms would at least have helped distract the eye from them.
Adding to the list of odd choices with this toy, the key-activated gimmick doesn't seem much more useful in this mode than it did in vehicle mode. Pop the key into the slot on either wheel and the six stubby blades pop out... but then they're just hanging off Landmine's back. Granted, the back panel can be raised over the robot's head via the same double hinge used for transformation... but then he has a bladed-wheel behind each shoulder, and that still doesn't seem very practical. The small, rubber-rimmed wheel at the bottom of the backpack can be used to rotate both wheels simultaneously, but that just looks like the universe's least efficient threshing machine, as the blades remain about a centimetre apart. Plus, the panels on which the wheels are mounted don't actually clip into their robot mode configuration and, while their hinges aren't loose, there's nothing to stop them falling away from the wheels which drive them, which are embedded in the central block. Perhaps the strangest thing, though, is that there's significantly more sculpted mechanical detail on the inside panels of his backpack than on any of the parts that are active and visible in robot mode.
Landmine's piledriver becomes a more traditional hand-held missile launcher in robot mode. Its peg is remarkably short compared to similar weapons on other Cybertron/Galaxy Force toys, but it's a very snug fit in either hand, so there's no danger of it falling out. When not in use, it can even be 'holstered' in its vehicle mode port, on his back. In that position, it can become a forward- or rear-facing launcher combined with the backpack, raised to shoulder level.
There certainly seem to be a few common design elements between the head sculpts of Cybertron Landmine and Energon Landmine, despite their differences in size and vehicle mode. The main difference is the absence of a translucent plastic visor here, likely omitted due to the smaller size, though they could just as easily have made the visor a solid part of the head, just painted in. The sharply angled forehead and jutting chin are much the same, but the paintwork is vastly different - silver for the face rather than red, while the red forehead plate could be a callback to the Energon toy's visor. The biggest surprise - particularly with this being the Hasbro version of the toy - is that he has small additional paint applications in the form of silver paint on the circular details jutting out on either side of his chin, as well as two tiny lines of silver down the chin itself. But for the very humanoid face, it's one of the more striking heads from the Cybertron line, just a shame it's molded in brown plastic. As noted above, I only really got this figure because of its BotCon reuse as a pre-Beast Wars Rhinox, using this same head sculpt, and it worked pretty well there, too... Which is surely the sign of a good head sculpt.
Like a lot of the Cybertron/Galaxy Force line, Landmine manages to do a lot with a relatively simple and straightforward transformation. With the exception of the backpack, everything is very efficient and probably could have even been accomplished equally well in a smaller size class. The legs straighten from underneath the vehicle, the front wheels rotate 180° so the wheels are behind the mudguards at the sides of the ankles, the feet open out. Splitting the scoop apart allows the arms to swing out to the sides, with the hands being revealed by swinging the scoop back along the forearms. At this point, the legs can be fully swung out into position, and the groin piece to be levered down via the tabs above the hips. The rear wheels fold out, the backpack flaps down against his back, then the exhaust pipes can be split apart and swung back either side of Landmine's head. A few points about his transformation puzzle me: firstly, there's a peg and socket between the two halves of the exhause pipe block, which makes them quite fussy to transform back into vehicle mode, as they have to be moved back together simultaneously, and they're not geared to facilitate this. Then there's the groin chunk, which doesn't clip or peg into place in either mode, instead relying on the two levers' inaccessibility in vehicle mode to prevent accidental deployment, but making it far too easy to accidentally nudge it back into his body in robot mode. Finally, there are small, round sockets on the undersides of the red parts of Landmine's backpack which look as if they're supposed to accommodate pegs (which would be roughly in line with the fronts of his feet, but to the outer edges of his lower legs) to keep the legs in place in vehicle mode... but no such pegs exist, and it's purely his knee joints supporting the lower legs - and the entire rear wheel assembly. It's possible that pegs existed at some point during development, but were removed as they were prone to breaking, either during transformation or play, as their size and position may have made them fragile.
Thanks to a good selection of joints, Landmine is another very well-articulated figure in the Cybertron/Galaxy Force line, with only a couple of hitches. The arms, obviously, are badly encumbered with large, unwieldy halves of the vehicle mode's scoops, though they don't - in and of themselves - obstruct any articulation and, if anything, their involvement in his transformation gives him something approaching wrist articulation. The elbows are ball joints giving a hair over 90° bend as well as full 360° rotation in lieu of a bicep swivel. The upper arm can swing out slightly beyond the horizontal, while the shoulder's ball joint can rotate through a full 360° (butting up against the wheels on his back unless the elbow is bent), and also swing forward - butterfly joint-style - thanks to the needs of transformation. There's no waist articulation, nor upper thigh rotation and, while the hips are ball joints, their range is limited by the chunky design of the thighs. They can swing forward and back by 90°, but the wheels on the backpack limit the backward swing to only about 45° unless the whole assembly is lifted out of the way. They can additionally swing out to almost 45°, but the sculpting of the upper part of the thigh and the surrounding area starts to cause resistance. The hip can also twist a little on its ball joint, but it's not that useful. Landmine's knees bend the requisite 90°, and there's an unrestricted swivel just below the knee. He has no articulation around the feet, as such, but the heel and toe sections can be adjusted independently, and are tight enough to provide support for the more dynamic poses. If there's a problem with the legs, its that the thighs are so short. Lifting the leg forward the full 90° and then bending the knee, the lower leg doesn't even clear the robot's central torso mass. The head is only on a rotation joint, but its design isn't really conducive to any kind of tilt anyway. It's worth noting also that, since the arms make up the workings of the scoop in vehicle mode, it can lift a little over 90°, while the scoop itself, due to the angled sculpting of its joint, can sit quite securely in three positions across a 180° range, with a small amount of play in each.
BotCon 2006 Rhinox may have been a pleasant surprise but I have to confess that, in retrospect, Landmine is a little underwhelming. With the exclusive repaint, there was the advantage of my unfamiliarity with the mold... but, by the time I'd bought the original Cybertron toy, there were no surprises to be found. That's not to say it's a bad figure... but, certainly in comparison with some of the other Cybertron/Galaxy Force figures, he's almost aggressively mediocre, and the choice of colours doesn't really do him any favours. It may be vaguely consistent with his Energon forebear, but the orange and blue have been dramatically desaturated and lightened, and brown is seldom a good look in a TransFormers toy. He certainly looks better in vehicle mode than in robot mode, and I think the dry-brushed silver weathering on the scoop is pretty much the highlight of the toy. Much as I like his key gimmick, it seems impractical - if not almost useless - in both modes. In many ways, Landmine is one of those rare TransFormers toys that's far more effective in vehicle mode than in robot mode, because he works well as a basic construction vehicle toy.
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