The highly anticipated second season of The Mandalorian launches today on Disney+, so now seems as good a time as any to take a closer look at the Razor Crest, which was finally released on August 31st after selling out almost immediately nearly six months earlier via preorders. The set is now back in stock online (US $129.99 | CAN $159.99 | UK £119.99), built from 1,023 pieces and featuring the Mandalorian himself, Greef Karga, IG-11, a Scout Trooper, and the Child.
The box & packaging
Excluding large sets like 75290 Mos Eisley Cantina, LEGO Star Wars set box design is fairly standardized by this point. The “hero” character image in the upper-right on the front of the box features the Mandalorian in minifig form, while the back of the box shows the set’s play features.
The parts for the set come in six groups of numbered bags. The trans-clear printed canopy piece is loose in the box, although the lack of other loose bricks means it’s unlikely to get scratched up in transit. Unfortunately, despite being in their own sleeve, both the instruction booklet and sticker sheet were curled up inside the box, causing them to come out bent.
Ultimately, the large sticker sheet wasn’t actually damaged. The designs add a variety of technical details to large panels, slopes, and so on. It also becomes immediately evident that we’re not going to see new, unique versions of the carbonite blocks in which prisoners like Han Solo are frozen — Mando’s frozen prisoners appear as stickers on tall bricks.
The build
Despite being a bit of a chunky vessel that looks more like the size of a starfighter than a cargo ship at first glance, the Razor Crest at any semblance of minifig-scale necessitates a substantial number of bricks for a substantial build — in this case, from over a thousand pieces. Like nearly all other moderately large LEGO Star Wars vehicles, the core of the ship consists of standard plates and bricks reinforced with Technic bricks and beams.
To support the heavy upper section that sits over the fairly spacious cargo hold occupying most of the interior space, you construct a Technic box.
The ship starts taking a recognizable shape by the third bag, adding sections of skin to the fuselage over the underlying Technic frame.
Many of the skin sections are attached with clips or click hinges, allowing access to the interior.
By the fifth bags, the fuselage is entirely complete, including the cockpit with the new trans-clear curved piece.
The sixth and final group of bags provide the parts for the outboard engine nacelles. The mirrored engine sub-assemblies incorporate more Technic to provide sturdy, secure attachment points from the round engines to the fuselage.
The finished model
LEGO has shared publicly that it can take the company two to three years to develop a new set from concept to boxed product on store shelves — we’ve seen this quite obviously with the particularly long development cycle for the new LEGO Ideas Sesame Street set. Disney and Lucasfilm managed to pull off an entertainment industry miracle with The Mandalorian, revealing virtually nothing about the show until after the first episode (and its shock ending that revealed “Baby Yoda”) had dropped on Disney+ on November 12, 2019.
Given all that, it’s quite amazing that LEGO had a production design of Razor Crest in place within just a handful of months, in time for us to see both Razor Crest and the BrickHeadz pair in person at Toy Fair in February. Despite that very short lead time, the LEGO Star Wars design team has succeeded in creating a reasonably accurate version of the Razor Crest in brick form. Like the ship in the show, the LEGO Razor Crest features a blunt nose with a cockpit on an upper deck.
The cockpit canopy is an entirely new piece, printed with a design that will work nicely in custom creations like historical bombers.
While it does attach securely over the cockpit itself, the canopy is easily removable to allow access inside, where two minifigs can sit one behind the other. It’s highly probable that LEGO did have access to the Razor Crest design in advance, but likely had no awareness of the Child until all the other toy manufacturers (and the rest of us) did. Probably as a result of the ship and the figure being designed months apart, there isn’t a way to place Baby Yoda on the dashboard or in any other way in the cockpit resembling how he, uh, copilots with Mando on the show. A minifigure microphone would have made a perfect knob for the mischievous 50-year-old to play with.
Both sides of the lower deck open up to allow access to the interior. The starboard side has a berth, and the port side has a compartment where you can store the red spring-loaded missiles so you don’t lose them.
Farther aft, the sides flip down to reveal the fairly spacious cargo hold, where Mando stores his frozen bounties on racks. With the side panels down, there isn’t much to hold the carbonite quarry in place, so expect them to fall out when you open the panel.
The carbonite blocks themselves, while disappointing that they’re not printed, are reminiscent of the original 1x2x5 bricks with frozen Han Solo printed on them, before LEGO released the unique molded piece.
In addition to the opening rear cargo ramp, the side panels are segmented so that one of the panels serves as the passenger ramp that played a pivotal role in the first episode.
The upper surface of the fuselage includes an escape pod very similar to the one Rey rides from the Millennium Falcon to Supreme Leader Snoke’s flagship in The Last Jedi.
The coffin-like pod fits a minifigure with the character’s face showing through the round porthole. It’s not clear from the first season of the show whether the “real” ship has an escape pod in this spot, but Hasbro’s $350 version has a similar pod in the same spot, so I think it’s safe to assume it’s “legitimate.”
Next to the escape pod, 1×2 plates with clip connections serve as small buttons to activate the spring-loaded missile mechanism.
Even though most of the bulk of the engines is built from large round panels with big stickers, both the intake and exhaust have enough detail to make them interesting.
The minifigures
The Mandalorian himself (real name: Din Djarin) is joined by Bounty Hunters’ Guild boss Greef Karga, assassin-cum-nurse-droid IG-11, a Scout Trooper, and the Child.
Both Greef Karga and IG-11 are new for this set, although the only real difference from IG-88 is the subtle differences on the printed 1×1 round brick.
Greef wears a sleeveless great coat on the show, but LEGO has yet to produce a cloth piece that works like ones available from custom cape producers. That means he just gets arms of a different color. His torso design features various leather straps on a dark red tunic, and he has a reversible head.
But really, we’re all here for one thing, right? The Baby Yoda figure uses the body of the minifigure baby released in LEGO City sets within the last couple of years, with a unique head piece. It’s cute, but capturing the impish look of the character on the show proves a challenge too difficult to overcome at this small scale — something that the simplified version in 75317 The Mandalorian & the Child BrickHeadz and the large-scale 75318 the Child both managed to achieve (which, by the way, is finally on sale today).
It’s kind of awesome that of all the miscellaneous figures that LEGO could have chosen as “filler” minifigs, they chose a Scout Trooper. The one missing accessory is a pouch for the trooper — fitting the Child into it (for safe passage, not for punching, sheesh) might not have worked, but it would have been a nice allusion to one of the best moments of the show.
Back when we reviewed the AT-ST raider, our friends at BrickArms had just released a pair of custom, hand-injected weapons inspired by Mando’s weapons in the show, but they’d already sold out by the time we published the review. Because of their limited quantities, they may not be available right now, but they do make a perfect companion to the official minifig, despite the brick-built Amban phase-pulse rifle working quite well with a clip piece for the fork. If you want a set of your own, you can pick them up from Citizen Brick or Brickmania (depending on availability).
With or without the custom weapons for added accuracy, Mando and the Child make a great pair.
Conclusions & recommendation
LEGO has released several sets to support The Mandalorian, starting with 75254 AT-ST Raider (basically a recolor of an existing design released a month ahead of the show last year), followed by 75317 The Mandalorian & the Child BrickHeadz, 75318 the Child (launching today), and 75292 Razor Crest. LEGO is clearly providing a version of the Child for every style of LEGO Star Wars collector, at a range of scales. But for traditional minifig collectors, only the AT-ST and Razor Crest add substantially to our collections.
The ship itself features some really fun play features, despite some missed opportunities that are probably just the result of confidentiality and the compressed design timeframe, it’s great to have a good-looking version of the ship from the show.
The minifig selection itself is solid, including the Scout Trooper, with brand new figs of Greef Karga, IG-11, and the Child (although Baby Yoda is now also available in the large-scale 75318). The Mando minifig may not be new, but it’s certainly great to have a second option for adding him to your collection.
But unlike many of the LEGO sets supporting “secondary” Star Wars properties (those outside the nine-movie Skywalker Saga) like Rogue One, LEGO has priced this set at a premium — $130 for just over 1,000 pieces. The original pre-order of this set sold out in hours, and with the new season of the show launching just in time for the holiday shopping season (yes, we see you, Disney…), it’s unlikely you’re going to see this set on discount anytime soon. Nevertheless, it’s a solid addition to the LEGO Star Wars collection of anybody who’s enjoyed The Mandalorian.
But this set has been out for a few weeks now, so we expect many of our readers already have their own. What do you think? Sound off in the comments, but let’s keep the discussion free of Season 2 spoilers for now.
As a final side note, there has been a minor kerfuffle in Europe about the name of the ship, and LEGO had to change the product name for the set in locations like Germany and the UK, where it is still listed as “The Mandalorian™ Bounty Hunter Transport”. The official name of the Star Wars ship itself has always remained Razor Crest, and the set’s name was unaffected in most other places, like the US, Canada, and Australia. This seems to us like a trademark squatting issue and not something worthy of much discussion or attention, but we’ll note it here for completeness.
LEGO Star Wars 75292 The Razor Crest from The Mandalorian includes 1,023 pieces with five figures and is available now from the LEGO Shop (US $129.99 | CAN $159.99 | UK £119.99), Amazon.com, and elsewhere, as well as from third-party sellers on marketplaces such as eBay.
Read all our reviews for LEGO Star Wars sets inspired by The Mandalorian:
Is it me or does the back of the clone trooper helmet look like a space helmet for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?
I think they came up with a really well-done design, it has lots of play-features whilst keeping the looks faithful to the on-screen counterpart. The minifigure selection is good (although Kuill would have been a great addition, since there isn’t much potential for him to be featured in a different set) and the carbonite “figures” are a nice addition: they do not warrant special, expensive moulds like Han Solo in carbonite, or even an inclusion because they are largely inconsequential to the overall story, but they are here anyway in a kind of low-budget version.
One of the ship’s other strengths is literal: it can be picked up almost anywhere to be swooshed around, which is great for adults (it is rather heavy).
What surprised me most about the ship is its size. The box is very small, and so going into the build I expected it to be much smaller than it turned out to be. I guess it is an effect of only getting Lego sets once or twice a year and TLG making smaller boxes because of climate concerns.
My only major disappointment with the set are the engine exhausts: they feel a little underdesigned.