Lego review: Lego 9490: Droid Escape

Lego has always been a favourite of mine since I was young. Back then, I remember there wasn't any tie-ins or movie or comic character related themes. I had a quite a big space ship set with predominantly white pieces. You could literally build whatever variation of spaceship with the parts provided, being  limited only by your imagination or the parts. 
Fast Forward 3 decades and Lego has literally expanded into so many different areas and has the license to do Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, DC and Marvel Superheroes etc etc theme sets. I really love what they're doing with the Mindstorms and Technic lines too.
Admiration from afar until I was brought back to the fold, so to speak, by the DC and Marvel Superhero sets. Like quicksand, I also caved in and started buying Star Wars sets. Droid Escape is the first Star Wars set that I've gotten. 
I was drawn to it by how cool the sandtroopers minifigs looked and you can't go wrong with R2D2 too! (nevermind C3PO haha :D )
Enough small talk, back to the review! 

The Package

This is quite a relatively small attractively packaged set (as shown below)

Basically, the package contains 4 minifigs (2 sandtroopers, R2D2 and C3PO), a speeder bike and the escape pod that the droids escaped on that crash landed on the sands of the planet Tatooine.

The Contents

Clockwise from bottom left, you get 2 packs containing parts, 2 larger pieces that are part of the cone of the escape pod, a sticker sheet and the instruction booklet.

Minifigs

For R2D2, you just connect his head and legs to his body, like so:

Nice detail for the paint job!

For C3PO, similarly, you connect his head and legs to his torso.

If you notice closely in good light, the paint job on C3PO is quite a shimmery gold. Kudos to the body detail too.

I deliberately did the before and after shot for the sandtroopers as shown below:

In addition to the usual head and legs, each trooper has helmet, a paper cape a rifle and some sort of backpack. These two are differentiated by their weapons(a blaster and a longer rifle) and their paper capes (one is orange, the other white). Great attention to detail was paid on the helmet, body and legs by Lego. The face even has stubble. Guess the Empire isn't sponsored by Gillette. What I don't love is the paper cape. It is pretty flimsy and can be torn easily so handle with care!! Would have preferred better material like rubber or cloth.

The Vehicles

First up is the speeder bike, which is quite easy to assemble:

Pretty sparse, but it does capture the essence of the speeder bike used in the movie. However, it only sits 1 minifig. They probably have to do Rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock to see who gets to ride and who has to trudge across the dessert.

"Dude, that better not be a freaking Brompton!"

The Escape Pod

Being the bigger vehicle, definitely needs more assembly but instructions are easy to follow. Below pic shows one half of the escape pod assembly in progress:

The sticker sheet provided is to add detail to the completed escape pod as below:

Need to have a steady hand to handle the stickers especially if you are a stickler for accuracy. But you can restick them if you made a mistake as long as you don't rip them out too fast.

Overall, assembly shouldn't take you more than an hour even if you're half drunk or just really slow. I have an excuse, I was trying to position the toys to take nicer pictures hahaha :) 

Overall, a nice set to own.

And I conclude with this parting shot:

"But Sir, Tolong! In my defense, there are no controls or brakes on this thing. Didn't mean to whack into that ERP gantry!"

Available at all major department stores, Amazon France , Amazon UK or Amazon US whichever is a cheaper option for you.