Name: Lockdown
Series: Animated
Allegiance: Decepticon
Alternate Mode: Muscle Car
CAR MODE
Height: 3.5cm Length: 11cm Width: 4.5cm
A black stylised muscle car with a bright red front window, unpainted side windows and some lime green on the front fenders, Lockdown has silver on his engineblock, exhausts on the sides and the cowcatcher at the front. His headlights are red along with a patch on top of the engineblock. The colour scheme is similar to that of the full sized toy, with some simplification. The loss of red on the side windows really hurts, partly because in their place is a messy rivet, and partly because the sides have a lot of hinge rubbish anyway, and really needed some paint to draw the eyes away.
While most of the Activators have hinges on the alt modes somewhere, Lockdown's sides are a mess of hinges, gaps, rivets and very little car. The entire door area is just a mess, which really hurts the look here. The rear section is a green panel which doesn't really look like the back of a car, and tends not to sit flush. The end result is a pretty mashed up car mode. The front fenders don't clip in - since they have to spring out during the transformation - I can live with the fact that they don't clip in, but I'm annoyed at how easily they sag.
There's not much play value here - Lockdown's wheels roll and that's it. I won't count massaging the back plate or fenders into place as play value.
While this isn't the worst vehicle mode amongst the Activators, it's the most annoying. The deficiencies here are hard to miss thanks to the loose pieces and skipped paint. It's clearly inferior to the deluxe version's car mode.
TRANSFORMATION TO ROBOT MODE
Slide back the top of the engineblock, causing the back to fold down and the cabin to split out to the sides as arms. Those front fenders also pivot forward as legs. Stand him up, swing down the arms and flip him his feet.
ROBOT MODE
Height: 11cm Width: 7.5cm
A black robot with lime green on his shoulders and thighs, along with painted lime green on the torso. Lockdown's chestplate is the dull green back plate of the car, with a silver Autobot logo that faces down. The face and spines on his neck are silver, along with his feet. The eyes and left kneecap are red - this is deliberate. The colours only loosely match those of the deluxe, which is understandable considering that the transformation is completely different. The colour layout is decent considering how different the transformation is, but isn't especially satisfying.
The robot mode suffers visually from the change in transformation. The forearms are clearly the underside of panels (the cabin), and lack the EMP generator or hook of the larger toy, instead there are generic black hands. The chest plate just looks bad, it floats in place awkwardly, and the door panels sit on his hips, they can't really get out of the way of his thighs.
deluxe).
Lockdown's poseability is disappointing. His head turns but looks weird when you do so, thanks to the neck shape. The shoulders, elbows and hips are ball jointed but the shoulders are pretty useless since the panels they anchor to slip gears really easily, leaving the arms hanging awkwardly as soon as you try to pose him. Realigning the gears is just as tricky as getting them to slip is easy. The heelspurs are fairly useful as are the knees, which are very restricted ball joints (they might as well be hinges), however there's no way to get the door panels out of the way of leg poses. The end result is decent poseability with few poses that actually display well.
A fairly poor robot mode, at least as far as the rest of this line goes. The articulation is good but he can't really use it, the colours and remapped layout are disappointing.
VARIATIONS
None that I'm aware of.
OVERALL
A disappointing Activator, Lockdown has a robot mode hampered by some bad engineering, a vehicle mode compromised by excessive hinges and other junk, an autotransform which allows gears to slip too easily ad neither of his signature features in robot mode. While the original toy is very lanky, it's a lot better than this - the weakest of the six Activators I've reviewed until this point - 3.5/10
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