I don’t know why I bought him that fast even though I never have interest in him initially. I don’t know who and what Darksteel is nor do I care about his incarnation Quickstrike in BW. And typically I tried to avoid repaints unless they are too good to pass or too important as a character. Above all these, I still bought Darksteel and he is my very first DOTM deluxe class that is opened today. Is he any good? No. Let’s read on.

Darksteel is a shoved off top Corvette Stingray and a repaint of DOTM Sideswipe. He is majority dark brown with some neon blue flames and his interior is highly detailed with seats, dashboard, and steering wheel. What went wrong is he is missing the floorboard to be a perfect car. As all DOTM toys are shrunk, Darksteel’s car mode is slightly smaller than ROTF Sideswipe and much lighter. He doesn’t roll well as he isn’t that easy to align flat and the bigger problem is he is hard to keep himself together in car mode. The panels especially on the back do not connect well and feel easily falling apart from there. He has three MechTech ports here and can attach his weapons, but this feature never interests me that much.

Darksteel’s transformation scheme is completely opposite than ROTF Sideswipe. The car front used to be legs and the tail part is his chest and head. Now the car front forms the chest and head and the tail part is legs. Honestly the robot mode doesn’t look that much different even though the parts are completely opposite. Only odd thing is in ROTF Sideswipe, the exhaust pipes is folded down to be his real shoulder back rocket launcher but now is a fake one molded onto the inside cab. He is now given a toe on each foot to provide better balance. It is better but still not that easy to balance him. The knee can finally straighten up as I really dislike the bird legs, but he doesn’t have much knee movement as it cannot bent much, not even 90 degrees despite his legs are so thin. With the knees straighten up, he is only a tad shorter than ROTF Sideswipe if you compare them head to head. The hip design does not look as good as ROTF one but provide him a little more movement. Arms and body are all okay and the back wings do not have that much joints to move around but still quite poseable. I’m glad his face does not look so much movie-ish so I can put him with my classics as I planned initially. He comes with two weapons and these are modified weapons from DOTM deluxe Starscream. Each weapon has both a gun barrel and sword (sickle) on one end and the bigger one has the MechTech feature. The two weapons can be combined into one super long double sword, it is too long for Darksteel to hold properly plus his weight is so light also. In theory these two weapons should connect tightly but mine doesn’t. They just keep popping back out and hard to stay connect. The easiest way for me to fix this is just by removing the spring out from the big weapon. Overall he is a good toy but I just don’t like the way his plastic is so thin and weighted so light.

Transformation: 6 – Well designed and less complicate. Fitting parts together in car mode is a little bit challenging or I should say they cannot be fit tightly together.
Fun: 6 – Car mode does not roll well. Not like ROTF Sideswipe parts are sticking out at the bottom, it’s his parts and panels do not connect well for him to roll. Robot mode is fine but balancing him still takes some time for some poses.
Display: 8 – His paint job is fine and he is well detailed.
Value: 10 – He didn’t cost me a penny so I won’t complain anything. Otherwise any regular retail price is reasonable for him but he isn’t that easy to find.
Overall: 6 – After playing with him, I will never consider about getting DOTM Sideswipe (in fact, I did have one but donate it to Toys For Tots) especially I already have the ROTF one. But if you want a different character such as Darksteel and don’t care much about repaint/retool, he is still worth the purchase.