I love getting cheap Lego. It’s almost like a challenge to see how little you can pay per piece. But the £14.99, 81 piece Lego Star Wars First Order Stormtrooper (75114) does not meet that criteria. At 18.5p per piece, this is some of the most expensive Lego I’ve ever bought (although Amazon now have it for less than £12).
But is it really Lego? With the large number of moulded and printed pieces designed specifically for this set, you may struggle to find ways to use these in your own builds. Similar to the recent Hero Factory and Bionicle sets, it uses the Lego Character and Creature Building System (CCBS) to create a movie accurate, highly posable action figure out of a series of bones and ball joints. It snaps together very easily, and with so many of the parts being unique, you could probably guess where most of went simply by ignoring the instructions and just looking at the picture on the box.
The finished model reminds me a lot of the Super Hero Masher range, which has a similar ball joint for connecting arms, legs and the head. The idea of those is that you can swap Captain America’s body and legs for The Hulk’s, or create weird non-humans with nothing but giant legs and heads for arms. The Lego figure is much more detailed, and if you had more than one in this range, you’d have the same creative opportunity.
The problem is that they’re too brittle. The body parts don’t connect to the ball joints with a strong enough connection, which means it’s easy for them to fall off even when trying to pose the figure. It’s not completely terrible, they’re not going to fall off with every movement, it’s just a factor of the design that smashing two of them together (as younger kids are bound to do) is likely to leave a small pile of armor sitting on the floor.
Which is a shame, because it’s a very nice looking figure, with play features including a gun that actually fires projectiles. I just don’t see that Noah could play with it unless he was a bit older and a lot more careful. For the AFOL or even just a big Star Wars fan, they would look great as a collection on a shelf along with other characters in the range.
I was highly skeptical of these, but after building one they’re much nicer than I gave them credit for. I just wish they were a bit tougher.
