Tapeformers return: Rewind

I bit the bullet, took the plunge, took a gamble and won, mostly.
With Buzzsaw nearly killing my appetite for Titans Returns as a whole it took handling some of the toys in hand before I dared to make another attempt at one of the former tapes.

Visually he looks quite tempting. The IDW inspired head gets a lot of love as well. The only minor nitpick there is the lack if a little red paint in his head camera.
Coming in robot mode all the nostalgia points are hit. The included gun can be handheld or mounted on the arm recallung the G1 toy. Rewind in this incarnation however only comes with a single gun.

The only thing really hinting at Rewind's new life are the legs. I dislike the tankdetail and the small feet offering somewhat lacking stability. It almost feels like the upper body was done in 90% of the design time with the legs being done as an afterthought.
Now these details do come in to play later along. No longer a tape we now get a little tank like vehicle as one of the modus of this new design.

Honestly this mode feels a lot like something thrown in because Hasbro simply did not believe a dataslug, tablet or smartphone altmode would sell. It's hard to ignore all the stickers and the way the arms and gun connect for the turret makes me fear a lot for those fragile applications as well. This will most likely be the first and last time mine ever appears as such.
In short, cute that they included but the real altmode is here:

A nice touch is is using an image of his old mode as a background image for the phone/tablet. To my happy surprise the gun also neatly integrates to the side.

Now for the part that almost did me in on the first dataslug. The stickers. Well the good news is you don't have to apply them yourself despite what the instructions say.

The bad news though is that while slightly better applied the stickers are still prone to peeling and feel very very flimsy. Not something I feel included to handle much, give to my son or launch from Blaster.

All in all he has the looks but he'll be a shelf bot to look at and not a toy to fiddle with. Considering Blaster is very much a handson toy that is truly a shame.