Skystalker has an additional battle mode: fold the engines back 90 degrees so their rear faces down. The engines fold back another 180 degrees at the robot knee so the engine fronts are pointing down. Fold the feet down under legs. This is almost a traditional Robotech Gerwalk mode albeit with no arms. The effect here is to make the spyplane look like a bird.... and of course since the spyplane is coloured black, the bird is a blackbird which in turn is the name of a type of spyplane.
TF: fold the legs out into battle mode and then bend back behind the plane. Fold the landing gear up, fold the nose under the jet and fold the head down - be careful when folding the head back to make sure the horns on the back of the jet fold into the jet's fuselage. Look at the underside of the jet - robot's chest - and unpeg the wings from the fuselage folding them forward. Separate the rear of the jet down the middle and fold up & to the sides at the shoulders to form the arms - the shoulders themselves swing up and into some of the space occupied by the jet's nose preventing the nose from folding back while the arms are extended. Fold the arms down to the side and rotate the elbows so the forearms can fold up.
The first thing you'll notice with the robot mode is the feet - well if you haven't already formed the battle mode that is ! They point straight down and are spring loaded close so need to have some weight applied to them to open them up. In a neutral standing position all the force is pushing in one direction and may not be enough to keep the claws open resulting in the robot toppling over. The best solution I can offer is to rotate the lower legs out by about 20 degrees at the knee which will result in the robot being much more stable. The vehicle's wings are mounted on ball joints on the upper arm. This gives you the ability to move them around and create very different looks for the robot mode from straight up behind the robot, to stored pointing down behind the robot's back to straight out as wings. Within the wings are contained Skystalker's weapons - push them through the wings and push the peg at the base into the palm of the robot's hand. The pegs used here have matching holes on other toys - look out for them. The base of the axe also has a C-shaped clip which can lock round Skystalker's forearm and onto the 3mm bars found on other Transformers toys. The head on the toy isn't really traditional transformers style but neither is it quite like the other Bayformers. The horns out the back are more traditional Transformers design but the large round head with it's single cycloptic eye are a little different. He's loaded with articulation and most of it involves ball joints: the top of the neck, shoulders, elbows and hips all feature ball joints while the bottom of the neck bends as do the knees and the ankles.
Overall: some real personality in this toy. Even if you've not been buying the Movie toys I think you aught to give this little guy - released this week in the UK through ASDA (I'm writing 24/04/2010). Well worth a look - and we've hardly looked at his ability to work with Mindwipe here !
Blue replaces black.
Black replaces olive grey.
It's a very nice looking repaint there's two downsides to it:
1) The blue plastic is reportedly quite weak and prone to cracking if you, say, pop the weapons out of the wings.
2) It's only available in a 2-pack with Smokescreen repaint of Mindwipe which was an exclusive at Tokyo Toy Show 2010, and thus costs a penny or two to buy.
Oh well.
White replaces black.
Slate grey replaces olive grey on the feet, legs and lower arms.
Yellow replaces olive grey on the hips, upper arms, c-clips and the neck
Add onto the white some extensive yellow paint and you get something that should look hideous, but doesn't. There's a small amount of inspiration taken from Sunstorm and his various spawn here. Somehow the colours work despite the madness of it. Sadly they aren't matched on Strafe, Mindwipe's repaint, who inexplicably becomes an Autobot to Sunspot's Decepticon and gets a pale grey and red paint scheme that in no way works with Sunspot's. Again, Oh dear.
Still at least Sunspot's great.