Lego R2-D2 - Review

Lego and Star Wars have had a partnership for 25 years now, and in that time, I've managed to accrue a pretty decent collection of ships and droids from a galaxy far, far away. In order to help celebrate Star Wars Day this year, Lego Australia were kind enough to send me their recent R2-D2 set, which takes the iconic astromech and delivers him to fans in a smaller and more portable version.

Back in 2012, Lego released the first big R2-D2 set with some 2100 pieces included in its build. When I got that one, it took me a day and a half of building because of so many of the little studs and fiddly pieces. It was just a very complicated build, my poor fingers took a beating on some parts, especially all the studs across the top of the dome. A few years ago, in 2021, they redesigned that version of R2-D2. They took what they had done and said cool, let's redesign everything all over again. It had been nine years between the designs, so a lot had changed with the technology that they had access to, for designing and of course making the parts so they were able to do something a bit special.

This new set is actually much smaller than those two, for lack of a better word, Deluxe versions. That's not to say that this R2-D2 is missing anything. He still has the tools, the third leg in the middle, he's just more economic in the design and the build. In fact, the design could be considered more efficient as this set has just over 1000 pieces where the more recent deluxe one is around 2300 pieces, so there's actually quite a lot less droid here. This is not a negative thing, because the smaller size pairs well with the recent C-3PO set that released. What I really like about this build was that it didn't require a lot of finicky pieces, when I built the original one a decade and change ago, there were a significant number of single square pieces that needed to snap together in order to make what I needed. For this design they were clever in the way they designed this version of R2-D2.

This new approach meant that there were some odd pieces that didn't make sense during the build, but when you snapped them into place, they made sense on the final product. One of the things that I really like about this version of R2-D2 is the head can rotate freely as you would expect it to and the main supports can move back and forth as well, which gives you the chance to actually have it lean back. That just means that when you display the set, it looks like he does in the movies, in what you might call his hero post. The only problem that I have with it, is the middle foot doesn't retract, it's always visible unless you physically take it out. Which is fine, except then you've got to store a pretty decently sized bit of Lego somewhere. As with most display Lego sets, it did come with a minifigure of R2-D2 and a display card, but it also includes a special 25th anniversary Darth Malak from Knights of the Old Republic.

There are a few stickers involved in putting all this together as well, the good news is that they weren't weirdly shaped or anything. The only ones that proved to be a pain were the thin ones towards the top of the front of the body only because again, they were quite thin. But as you're supposed to put those pieces on once everything's together, not the whole unit, but that individual section. It made it a lot easier to put them on because you already had a secure point to work from.

Overall, this R2-D2 build was fairly simple, it took me a few hours and whilst working on it, I managed to smash out some episodes of TV. At just over 1000 pieces, it is not a massive build and once completed it is not massive either, but it’s a fun build. What I liked about it was that it was not finicky, there are so many sets that have complicated parts that then get hidden, that is not the case here. Yes, there are some parts that don’t make sense on their own, but once you snap them into place, it makes sense what you were doing. Given the smaller size of the unit and smaller price, this is one piece that would look at home on the shelf of any collector.

The Score

8.5

Review unit provided by Lego

The Pros

A compact build that can easily be completed in a few hours

There are no super finicky builds, that require a lot of small parts to make…

The Cons

…but there are some parts that look weird out of context

Having the tools always on display when attached is just weird