Introduction

Solo: A Star Wars Story was a controversial film, one that I personally liked after watching it yesterday and reading the Expanded Edition Solo novel written by Mur Lafferty. When the film was released I was not into Star Wars very much, so I not only missed out on the film itself but also the sets based on the film.

Prior to this polybag being gifted to me by a friend, I had no idea this set even existed, and certainly had no plans to purchase this set.

I think this set was my first ever LEGO Star Wars set, an introduction to the universe of LEGO Star Wars.

Packaging

This set has normal polybag packaging, with a thin transparent strip on the back of the bag for you to peek at some of the parts. The art is the Solo box art, with the bright golden-yellow cloud-like design over the white rims of the packaging, which is a very attractive design in my opinion. Alden Ehrenreich's Han Solo as well as Chewbacca both appear as the box mascots.

Contents and Build

Inside the bag are the 22 included pieces, and a small set of fold-out instructions - the kind which you get in polybags and other extremely small sets.

It took me roughly a minute to put everything together.

Minifigure

The titular Han Solo Mudtrooper is the only minifigure included. There is great muddy printing on both face prints as well as all throughout the figure, and I really like it. Dark tan might not be the most accurate colour compared to the film, but I think it looks good on this figure. Han's hairpiece is coloured the same dark tan as the rest of the figure, and I believe this piece in this colour is exclusive to this polybag.

I really like this Han figure because even if the character only briefly appears like this, people can still recreate Han and Chewie's first meeting in MOCs.

Builds

Accompanying the lovely Han figure is a brick-built minifigure stand, which uses a simple but effective design that was used to create the base, and I would assume the builds of these bases would be exactly the same throughout this line of display minifigures.

The background is especially cool in my opinion, using a piece of a material unknown to me, with some beautiful printing in a tan colour scheme depicting what appears to be a crashed AT-DT on a Mimban battlefield. There is also a LEGO logo and a flame yellow Star Wars logo. The left and right sides of the base have a brick with Technic pin hole and a Technic pin respectively, a quality common throughout these sets, which allow them to be connected. Han stands on a black 3x4 minifigure display plate.

The base displays a nice plaque, represented by a black 1x4 tile with a sticker with the words "Han Solo Mud Trooper". It is unfortunate that LEGO chose to include stickers, even in a polybag like this one. If they were to have printed the words on the plaque, it would have pleased a lot more fans and these polybags would have had even more value.

Playability

This polybag was intended to be displayed along with the other similar polybags, but on its own it still makes a nice desk charm. As such, this set does not offer too much playability.

This is further worsened by the fact that this set does not come with weapons of any sort.
While it can be argued that Han never used any weapons during his appearance like this, the other polybag - Kessel Mine Worker - depicted a figure which was not shown using any weapons yet that set came with a pearl silver blaster pistol for the worker. It is also unfortunate that Han did not receive such treatment - a blaster rifle or pistol would've provided that much more playability.

Overall thoughts

I am satisfied with how this set turned out, but it still leaves something to be desired.

If you are a fan of the Solo movie, specifically Han and Chewie's first encounter, then you would like this little polybag - it's a reasonably priced little set. If not, don't bother picking it up unless you're a die-hard collector or only want to resell it when it goes up in value - after all, the minifigure is exclusive, even if it's only targeted towards a very specific audience.

If LEGO does this sort of thing again, I would love for them to make a Dryden Vos figure as he is one of the more notable missing characters from the LEGO Solo sets.

Thank you for reading, I hope you found this review helpful and informative.