Allegiance: Maximal
Function: Desert Combat
Alternate Mode: Armadillo
Height: 4cm Length: 13cm Width: 5cm
Armordillo's anatomy is pretty accurate to that of P. maximus, which is nice. His long front claws are slightly hooked, while the Giant Armadillo's are slightly more hooked. Armordillo has moulded scaling on his back, representing the scutes (bone plates) of P. maximus's shell and a short think tail, which is slightly shorter than on the real animal. He has pointy teeth protruding from his mouth, painted white, which isn't at all accurate - they tend to eat mainly insects and have stubbly teeth to grind the exoskeletons. Despite the teeth, this is a pretty decent attempt, and I'm pretty happy with both the effort and unusual choice of animal. Sure, it's odd but it's more interesting than yet _another_ dinosaur TF.
The play value here is very limited. While P. maximus is fairly flexible considering it has a bone shell on it's back, Armordillo's main body is fixed. The front claws have ball joints on the elbows and shoulders, the shorter hindlegs can swing back and forth and the tail can swing up and down on a hinge. The last one isn't terribly lifelike, mind you, since the hinge is really here for the transformation. The curved tail means you can hang Armordillo from a cord or string (or whatever) like a bat if you really want (c8
Aside from the silly teeth, my only other complaint here is the fact that his hindlegs are detachable weapons, which means that they detach fairly easily, and run the risk of being misplaced. There's a little undercarriage junk but he's close enough to the ground (or table) that it's not really an issue. Sure, it's a dull colour scheme, but it works for an armadillo and he's pretty true to the Giant Armadillo.
Height: 10cm Width: 5cm
As mentioned, the toes are beast claws, which is an interesting touch. Along with tight skin sculpting on his boots, the end result is a very organic robot mode. In fact the only robotic part is his waist, which is largely hidden behind the beast head. I don't mind this so much, since angular robotic parts would look odd in these colours. His head is sort of robotic, although it makes heavy use of circles in it's design.
The shell of the beast forms the robot's backpack, which is predictable really. It's quite close to his body and doesn't in itself cause stability problems - but he has very short feet and small heelspurs, so you have to get the pose right for him to stay standing, and unfortunately the weight of the backpack (if not position) means he has little meaningful leg poseability. I don't blame the backpack as such since heelspurs would have solved the problem - and I don't see why Armordillo doesn't have sizeable heelspurs.
While his effective poseability is limited, Armordillo is a very articulated toy. The neck, shoulders, elbows, hips and knees are all ball jointed, and while the hips and shoulders pop fairly easily, reattachment is also easy. The right rear leg becomes a mace weapon and the left leg a pistol, and they can mount on the holes halfway down the arms. He doesn't have true hands, rather long claws, hence the holes being midway. I don't like the claws in place of hands much, though at a basic pricepoint (especially a spring loaded one) it's hard to see how they could have avoided this. The weapons themselves are fairly well sculpted, but look kinda silly with the legs hanging off them.
If you don't like the way his weapons work, you can easily unclip the legs, but keep in mind the pegs to attach them in beast mode are on the weapons themselves. Other than the goofy weapons, the feet really bug me here. The articulation is really good, yet Armordillo ends up with little leg poseability. His arms are very poseable, but the weapons look silly, so it seems the poor guy can't win. There are some nice details here - the sculpting is great and the colours are more interesting, but this is the weaker of his two modes.