By viewer request (as voted on here at the time of writing:
https://www.strawpoll.me/15336306/r), the Sanctum Sanctorum can wait, for first we must travel to Africa, and start our two months of Marvel content with their newest movie (at time of writing). With Black Panther being such a huge success, its only fitting the new king of Wakanda gets some recognition this year. To those wondering why I'm not reviewing the movie, its because I review movies when they're out on DVD. Relax, I will get to it. For now, let's look at one of the two sets Lego put out for the movie with the Rhino Face-Off by the Mine... it just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Couldn't it have been something like "Battle at the Vibranium Mine" or something?
I'm going to write these reviews with the assumption that those reading this have at least heard of LEGO, and know of words like Minifigures. Is this going to be an in-depth review, analyzing every piece including new pieces, new colours and other information more useful to die-hard LEGO fans? No, cause chances are they've already bought the set if they were interested in it. I'll be looking at this more from a general perspective. I will start with the Minifigures though. The set comes with three and only one accessory for one of them. You get a Black Panther with some energy stored in the suit (watch the movie or look up the context, time and place for that, and this isn't it). Killmonger in his Vibranium suit, though not charged at all, and Okoye, leader of the Dora Milaje, who comes with her spear. All three do have really good prints on their chest, back and heads, though if you were hoping for alternate faces, you're going to be disappointed as none of them have anywhere to hide the second face. The ears of Black Panther and Killmonger only hide the stud connection on minifigure heads, and Okoye is meant to be bald. While it is a shame that none of the figures have some of the more luxurious print works, in that all three just have black legs and none of them have any printing on the arms, I can't help but feel there are things missing from the minifigures. I do wish they'd given Killmonger his swords, but the biggest gap is a character I feel should have been included... ok one of many, this was the big battle of the movie, but we never get nameless background characters in lego unless you're a muke in a Star Wars set. W'Kabi, while not playing a huge role in the movie compared to these three, he was still a main character and one of the Rhino riders in the movie. It also would have been nice to have gotten a M'Baku, but I can cut my losses when needed. Some would complain that "charged" Black Panther should be purple and not metallic blue, but I do think that the metallic blue looks great on the black body and plays off the gold on Killmonger quite well. I'd have liked it as well, but the change is something I can appreciate too. Still though, at least overall, these three are great minifigures.
The Vibranium Mine itself, a huge crater with magnetic trains floating too and from mining machines in the movie... is represented by a minecart, two pieces of scaffolding meant to look like tracks, and a mediocre catapult meant to launch the Minecart. This does well and truly feel like an afterthought in terms of the set design. I wouldn't be surprised if the lion share of the budget for this year's Marvel sets went into Infinity War, but they still could have done a better job then a minecart. Granted, its a futuristic looking Minecart, but its still a minecart. The catapult is a small, non-detrimental, but also not useful gimmick for the set. Its meant to flip the cart over and in testing, I got mixed results, though a common one was a drastic angle change, almost 90-degree difference, but then falling back down onto its wheels and onto the track. It's nice that you get some translucent blue pieces to act as Vibranium in the cart, and I personally added some of the spare pieces and ammo to fill the cart up more, but there's only so much you can do before needing to make something completely new to represent the battle.
The main focus of the set is the Rhino itself and... it's a pretty good Rhino. Not for something like a Zoo, unless you want a Rhino with laser guns mounted on its back, but a good Rhino none the less. The legs are attached with ratchet pieces so its very easy to place onto a base plate, and the articulation is solid for something its size. The head has a ratchet in its neck along with a swivel attached to the body to allow for posing, though it is a shame that there's nowhere for a turning piece to allow it to turn its head from left to right. The ratchet does expose a gap when you move it down a click, but considering the way it was engineered, its easy to let it slide. The legs can only move forward and backward at the body as there is no movement anywhere else in the pieces. One problem though is a small build in between the pairs of legs that limit the direction they can move. The front legs cannot move back further than a click, and the back legs cannot move forward more than half a click. You're going to have to work for your charging poses if you want to make use of the rhino belly as a space for a stand. I do however like that there is a tiny tail with a swivel on it, it's cute. As long as you move the head down a click, you can easily fire (without anything getting in the way) the two mounted stud launchers. These were introduced a few years ago and have become a universal weapon of sorts as there are a lot of versions of this launcher. The way it works is that it fires small lego pieces, normally round 1x1 tiles, using friction fire. Push the lever on it down and it'll fire. As handheld guns for minifigures, these do not work more often than not as the guns themselves look huge in the hands of Minifigures. Mounted on ships and animals, they can look good, though it just depends on where it's mounted and the size of the launcher compared to what it's on. It can be the difference between an oversized machine gun that would destroy the vehicle its attached to if it was fired, if not broken off by the wind itself as it flies, to a pathetic little pea shooter. On the Rhino, the launchers look fine, well proportioned for where they are, and what they would do.
Colours are evenly distributed along both the cart and the rhino, though if I had to nitpick, I do wish they'd cast the Rhino legs in grey instead of sand brown. There's enough of it on the rhino to make it look like the greys are armor, but those are large chunks of the colour and it does stand out a little too much. While I'm personally not a fan of sticker details, on lego I'm willing to give it a slide because of all of it you have to apply yourself. A lot of the time I would just ignore the stickers, particularly on Technic sets, but for the Marvel stuff I've been applying them and, with some exceptions just due to me doing these with my fingers and not the more sensible tweezers option leading me to put them on wrong, they have been going on well and do blend in with the sets. I do appreciate that these have been stickers for single pieces rather then putting a sticker on that covers several different pieces. I'm not going to complain about a bad application of stickers here, cause that was my own fault, other toys aren't going to be so lucky when I come to them.
Is this worth the $35-$40? Not really, I'd say wait for a price drop. While kids would enjoy this, most adult collectors would be buying this more for the minifigures, so to those people, I'd say to try and get them online off of second-hand sites. A neat little distraction, but if it had the budget, could have been so much better if you compare it to the scene in the movie. For three weeks, there will be no content on this site. Those three weeks will be 100% dedicated to the main site, which you can find here:
http://mediaholicreviews.blogspot.com.au/. If you are a Transformers fan, feel free to check out some of the previous posts related to the Dinobots. Up next on the main site is going to be the original Spider-Man from the early 2000's, and next time something goes live here, we hunt for infinity stones with the Infinity War Lego sets! Which one is going first? Not sure yet, you'll just have to wait and see.
