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Series: Generation 1
Allegiance: Autobot
Categories: Triple Changer
Year: 1986
When the smoke clears, I've cleared out.
Always takes death-defying risks. Anything less than dangerous is boring to him. In battle, gets close enough to count the bolts in Decepticon armour plates. As helicopter and buggy, he's adept at using rotos and exhaust to whip up blinding clouds of dust and sand. Extremely maneuverable. Carries sandblaster gun that shoots streams of silicate particles that can erode anything.
Robot Mode: As a robot Sandstorm is almost completely immobile, able to move nothing but his arms at the elbows and turn his head a little. Still, with a nice overall look and good detailing he would look pretty cool if not for the fact that his helicopter mode's tail rotor is situated right above his head. It looks pretty ridiculous, dragging down what is otherwise a decent-looking bot.
Alternate Modes: Just like the robot mode, Sandstorm's car mode suffers from the designers' not knowning where to put the tail rotor of the helicopter mode. Situated behind the motor block in the rear, it drags down the look a bit (though not as badly as in the robot mode). Still, as car modes go, this mode isn't bad at all, looking more or less like what it's supposed to.
Sandstorm does look pretty decent in his third mode as a helicopter. The Huey-style copter has a massive, powerful feel to it and I'd call it the best of his three modes. It has the added advantage that, while the car and robot mode look pretty similar, this mode looks very much different, adhering more to the 'in disguise' part of the Robots in Disguise.
Remarks: Sandstorm is not the best of the Triple Changers, but he isn't the worst, either (that honour will always belong to Broadside). Things might have turned out a bit better for Sandstorm if the designers had had some idea where to stash that tail rotor, but they didn't. The result is a figure that looks good yet somewhat strange in both robot and car mode and only manages to really shine as a helicopter.
Character-wise Sandstorm stands out, though, being not only the leader of a separate tribe of Autobots on the planet Paradron, but also because he is the sole Autobot who ever managed to strike up something of a friendship with a Decepticon, though a rogue one. In the episode "Starscream's Ghost" the Autobot got on friendly terms with Decepticon turncoat Octane, a development that prompted quite a bit of robot slash fic among other things. So on general terms Sandstorm is worth getting for the character, and isn't too bad as a figure. Let's call him average.
Rating: C+
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