Red 5 standing by! John Cheng gets torn into the LEGO bricks and brings us a super-cute Manga-styled rebel pilot. The bobble-head look is perfect — with a nicely-oversized helmet and those big anime eyes making this an adorable piece of work. Nice detailing on the flightsuit too — the dark grey bracket parts peeking between the orange bricks gives a real impression of pockets and seams. Lovely stuff.
The August 2018 wave of new LEGO sets includes a new batch of LEGO Star Wars sets from Solo: A Star Wars Story. We’ll be taking a closer look at each of these, beginning with 75215 Cloud-Rider Swoop Bikes. The set includes 355 pieces and 3 minifigures, and is available now.
Read our hands-on review of 75215 Cloud-Rider Swoop Bikes from Solo: A Star Wars Story
In our review of 75218 X-wing Starfighter last week, we covered the build process, minifigures, and the finished model, but we wanted to take another look at this new LEGO Star Wars set and show off some of the play features, as well as comparisons to previous incarnations of this iconic Rebel Alliance fighter.
Watch the video and see more details about this new LEGO Star Wars set after the jump
August is here, and the floodgates of LEGO have opened with 58 new sets available today. Fans of Star Wars, Technic, Ninjago, City & Trains, Friends, Harry Potter and even Unikitty and Powerpuff Girls have a lot to choose from. We have your guide right here of each and every new set.
Along with new sets, LEGO has two simultaneous gifts with purchase, including the brand new “Plants from Plants” box of elements sourced from sugar cane (free with purchases above $35), and the Unikitty Castle Room (free with Unikitty! purchases above $25).
There are a few sets that really stand out to us, but you can see the complete list of all 58 sets now available after the jump.
70657 Ninjago City Docks
3553 pieces | $229.99
We reviewed this set back in May and agree it is an absolutely delightful accompaniment to 70620 Ninjago City or a stunning stand-alone model.
42082 Rough Terrain Crane
4057 pieces | $299.99
The biggest Technic set of all time has arrived and reaches more than three feet high and can lift more than you expect. The set can also be rebuilt into a Mobile Pile Driver. Look for our review of this set in a couple of hours.
75218 X-Wing Starfighter
730 pieces | $79.99
After outings in orange and blue, the most recognizable Rebel fighter in the Star Wars universe becomes available to a new generation of LEGO builders. Check out our review of this must-buy set.
See all of the August 2018 wave of LEGO sets available now
Luke Skywalker gets roughed up quite a bit in The Empire Strikes Back, first by a giant Yeti-beast and later by his own dad, who cuts off his hand just for mouthing off and refusing to obey! As a result, Luke spends quite a bit of time in Rebel Alliance medical facilities, both on Hoth and aboard the Nebulon-B medical frigate. While LEGO Star Wars fans have clamored for a UCS or even microscale medical frigate for years, LEGO has instead focused twice on the bacta tank treatment scene, most recently with 75203 Hoth Medical Chamber. Available August 1st, this set includes 255 pieces with 3 minifigures and retails for $29.99.
Read our hands-on review of 75203 Hoth Medical Chamber
One of the most shocking scenes in Star Wars: The Last Jedi occurs on Supreme Leader Snoke’s enormous flagship the Supremacy, when Kylo Ren turns on Snoke and he and Rey join forces to battle the Supreme Leader’s Praetorian Guards. 75216 Snoke’s Throne Room captures this scene as a playset. The set includes 492 pieces with 5 minifigures and retails for $69.99.
Read our hands-on review of 75216 Snoke’s Throne Room from The Last Jedi
Despite — or perhaps because of — the release of two different T-70 X-wings produced in support of The Force Awakens in late 2015 and mid-2016, it’s been over six years since LEGO has released a version of the iconic T-65 starfighter featured in the Classic Trilogy. With the release of 75218 X-wing Starfighter on August 1st, the most recognizable Rebel fighter in the Star Wars universe becomes available to a new generation of LEGO builders. The latest X-wing includes 731 pieces and four minifigs and will retail for $79.99 in the US (CDN 99.99 | GBP 89.99).
How does this latest LEGO X-wing stack up against the previous X-wings released over the years?
Read our hands-on review of 75218 X-wing Starfighter
Don’t be misled by first impressions. This Rebel Alliance Space Station by Corry Lankford is an absolutely enormous LEGO creation — nearly two metres tall!
Corry has grabbed the “grubby realism” aesthetic of the Star Wars universe with both hands and stuffed his space station full of greebles and details, creating a genuine sense of a lived-in future. This shot of one of the decks showcases some of the texturing that’s gone into the model, whilst offering a glimpse of the detailed interior compartments…
Click to see more of this amazing Star Wars creation, including the accompanying spacecraft
Fans will be pleased to know that LEGO has released instructions for all 3 of the San Diego Comic-Con 2018 exclusive sets. Many of the sets in previous exclusives have had unique printed pieces or parts that make them hard for fans to build without paying the hefty secondary-market price. This year LEGO has taken the additional effort to show that they’re listening. While you still won’t get the exclusive packaging with comic book-style box, the rest of the parts should be available in other sets, or maybe already in your collection, and that’s a fair compromise.
Click on the images below to download the PDF instructions.
The single most recognized feature of the BTL-A4 starfighter, a.k.a. the Rebel Alliance Y-Wing, is the long tube-shaped engines or nacelles that give the starfighter its nickname. But an equally distinct design detail would have to be the greebling, or random non-specific technical looking details, that fill the rest of the ship behind the wedge-shaped cockpit. This microscale model by Tim Goddard has absolutely nailed both of these details in a very challenging scale for a model this complex.
The recent introduction of a number of tiles with rounded edges like the 1×1 quarter tile, the 1×1 incisor tile, as well as the 2×2 curved and angled tiles, provide a lot of detail both on the ship’s fuselage, and in the stand, which contains a slice of the Death Star surface. Another MVP with this model is the 1×2 silver ingot. The signature elements all come together perfectly.
Tim’s Y-wing joins his growing wing of Rebel starfighters at this scale, including a U-wing from Rogue One and classic X-wing.
You can tell that Nathaniel is a fan of Star Wars just by looking at the way he has lovingly upgraded the recent Boba Fett buildable figure set. Everyone’s favourite Mandalorian looks noticeably filled-out with new anatomical details added in the form of cleverly integrated brick built thighs. A number of other neat touches to his armour provide detail and a samurai twist. I suspect Nathaniel knows his Star Wars lore, specifically George Lucas’s debt to Akira Kurosawa’s epic The Seven Samurai, referencing the connection in the theming of his creation. I have to agree, that the bounty hunter reimagined as samurai warrior, banners flying, Katana in hand, striding across a flower-laden Shogun era meadow, looks amazing.
Builder Nooroyd demonstrates an exquisite cinematic approach in their take on Han Solo’s meeting with Lady Proxima from Disney’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. The creation’s photography captures the film’s beautiful blue-tinted realization of the planet Corellia, so well in fact, that on first inspection you might be fooled into thinking it a piece of lost concept art. However, look closer and you begin to see fantastic LEGO details like the fanned brick built entrance to the tunnel to the left of the picture, or the cleverly selected brick separator and Technic steering rack elements on the back wall.
