I got this set as a birthday gift for my 14th birthday and i love it, ive had the model from 2014 since it came out and i feel like this is a way superior model. The inside is the most movie accurate yet and i feel like its a great feature to have a speeder inside because in the books it has 2 speeders and 1 is better than nothing. I also like the discs on the side of the cockpit it really captures the dog look it has in the original movies. 1 minus is that the spin pieces in the cockpit have loosend up over the last 16 years (because they already came assembled) so they are a little flimsy. When u pick up the set from above it feels like the bottom part is going to fall off but it have not accured to me so its sturdy it just feels a little loose. Minifigs are great too im a real fan of the old luke so thats always great to have and the at at pilots helmet arent perfectly printed but it was harder to print on these helmets back in 2003 so its fine and it still looks great. So if u want a lego at at and have the money go for this ( i did not buy this set in 2003 so i really cant comment on the price to piece and value of this )

The building experience wasnt too fun because the legs were really repetitive but overall it was still enjoyable

I had the good fortune to receive this set for my birthday in 2004. I couldn't believe my eyes at first when I ripped off the wrapping paper. $100 Lego sets? That was something that happened to other, luckier people. I was very happy. It took me a while to get it built, but I was thrilled. I was also upset when due to my father's clumsiness it took a fall off the windowsill and smashed. And the instructions went missing soon after my birthday; I think my mother carelessly threw them out when cleaning (I swear, tidiness-obsessed parents have to be the inspiration for the Bohrok and Bahrag from Bionicle. "Clean it all it must be cleaned"). After that fall, the set was broken up for parts and remained parted out for a decade and change. But this January, I finally decided "Screw it, I'm rebuilding the bastard no matter how much of a pain it is and what I have to retrieve the parts from."

Box/Instructions

The box is standard 2002-2003 Star Wars packaging, with the set pictured sticking out of a cut-off circle justified on the bottom-right corner. It's also big, as one would expect with a big set. The instructions are quite clear. They have a nice but nondistracting starry background, and piece callouts. However, there is one instance of the instructions telling you to do something well before you actually should, which causes problems later.

Parts

Almost all of the parts are gray or dark gray. Not the most exciting color scheme, but the AT-AT walkers are giant masses of gray so it's quite appropriate. Lots and lots of plates and tiles, because the walker is a hollow box on bl?ocky legs. There are printed dishes for the hips and knees, parts it shares with sister set 4483 AT-TE. But there is one thing not among the parts selection that it could very much have used: A small rubber band. Given how much difference that would make, that one little thing takes a whole point off the parts rating. Another thing worth talking about is the two lengths of tubing for detailing the neck: They look okay for that purpose, but they're very plain parts that don't really look like Lego at all, so they're liable to get thrown out by careless parents or anyone else who doesn't pay much attention to the intricacies of one's Lego sets.

Minifigures

Four are included in this set.

• One Pilot Luke Skywalker, armed with lightsabre and pair-of-studs-with-cord (to represent the harpoon. Sadly no representation of the grenade), to let you re-enact the scene where he single-handedly wrecked a walker while on foot. Nothing different about him compared to the ones from 7130 and 7140.
• The original AT-AT driver minifigure, who (similar to TIE pilots at the time) has AT-AT pilot printing on a Stormtrooper helmet because Lego had yet to create the TIE Pilot helmet piece. His head is a blank yellow one.
• Two Snowtroopers. Like with the Scout Troopers and Clone Troopers of the time, the eyesockets in their helmets are hollow and get the black coloring from the head in order to create a recessed appearance. Unfortunately, they follow the Clone Troopers' route of having an all-black head instead of the Scout Troopers' yellow heads with giant sunglasses printed on (letting the heads work outside the helmets just as well as within). Also unfortunately, there's only two of them, which was problem at the time of release due to the rarity of Imperial troops in general and the unavailability of Snowtroopers in particular outside this set.

The build

The build is a lengthy process. The legs are built in pairs, each leg in a pair ending up diagonally opposite the identical one when attached to the chassis. It's best to double-build when putting them together or else the build will take longer still. The main body assembles much faster, since it's hollow. The seats for the Snowtroopers (which, as tends to be the case with Lego chairs be they built of multiple bricks or just the single chair piece, sacrifice usable seating space for looks) are on sliding trays, hidden by plates on hinges. An interesting technique. But when building the body, the instructions tell you to do something that you actually shouldn't do just yet: Build the part of the head assembly that slides in and clicks to the walker, and attach it. It's alright to build it to save yourself some back-and-forth flipping, but attaching it is unwise. This is because when you get to the head itself, it's very difficult to securely attach the axle and cylinder bricks of the neck to the hinged piece in this part of the assembly when it's already on the walker. And speaking of the head... It's nicely detailed, but there are parts of it that are a bit messy. The design itself is one of them. With the parts available at the time, Lego was forced to use hinge bricks mounted on 2x2 turntables to get the sides to be at the proper angles within the space limits of the head. But the pieces intended to hold them that way via blocking the path of the handle plate attached to the inner face of each side don't do it very well, especially if the turntables have developed play in the connection between base and revolving section. Despite the handle plates providing a perfect opportunity to solve the problem with a small rubber band, Lego did not think to include one. As many have pointed out, there's only seating room for the one driver as built, but I'm not really sure it would be worth modifying it to hold more; It's not like the AT-ST from the Battle of Endor set where you can see through the "eyes" into the cabin.

A speeder bike is also part of the build (AT-ATs are said to pack them, after all). It's almost identical in design to the one from 4482 AT-TE (It uses a handle brick with a gap where that one uses a tri-slope brick), and is basically that recolored in white because icy planet. The build is overall solid, the only things tending to come off being the steering vanes.

The completed model

The completed model, while not truly in minifigure scale, is still very tall and imposing. It very much looks the part of the menacing mechanical giants seen marching out of the fog on Hoth. There's plenty of detail on it where appropriate, it even manages to capture the leg pistons via tiles (appropriate, considering how close the pistons on the movie models are to blending in with the rest of the leg). It's proportioned well. The head looks a bit messy but gets the shape right. The hump of the middle section somehow ends up not looking as pronounced as it should from the side, but other than that it's good. The speeder bike is a bit of a space-hog, so between that and the space used by the brick-built chairs there's only seating for five passengers (someone riding the bike), but it's not too bad and easily changed if one so desires. The connection between the main body and the chassis, that can be a bit delicate, but it's not nearly as big a problem as the 2002 Republic Gunship's connection issue since the AT-AT is most easily picked up from below, which puts the burden of support purely on you.

The speeder bike itself is Lego's second design for the Aratech 74-Z Speeder Bikes. It captures the curviness of the cowling better than the first design from 1999 does, but as a trade-off it doesn't do the overall shape (especially not the back) as well. It has the right detailing, such as a backpack to represent the rolled-up tarp or whatever the 74-Zs are always shown packing, skis to represent the pedals, and a megaphone to represent the side turbine... but it could have been better. The 1999 version could have been better. With the speeder bikes, it's not like the key parts for getting the look right weren't around when they made the first effort - the motortrike body was very much around at the time! It just took Lego until 2009 to figure it out! And the split handlebars too! Even if they hadn't wanted to recolor the new Battle Droid arms in '99, the Classic Space robot arms would have worked just as well! ...ranting aside, it's still an okay speeder bike and fun to swoosh around.

Overall opinion

4483 was Lego's second big AT-AT (The absolute first being the AT-AT build of the Mindstorms-crossover Dark Side Developer Kit), and their first that was meant to go with minifigures. All in all, it was a very solid set. There were a few flaws to it, chief among them being the shortage of Snowtroopers (Though if you're getting it now, that's not nearly as bad as it was at the time of the set's release since battle packs and other Hoth sets have made it easy to get your hands on more - when the set came out it was the only set with Snowtroopers) and the lack of a much-needed small rubber band. But those aside, it's a very nice set. The minifigures are all good choices. Yes, even Pilot Luke. He was included so that the re-enactment fun of his epic walker takedown did not require you to buy another set, and even if you don't really need an extra of Luke himself, an extra lightsabre never hurt anybody (especially given how they're one of those things that just looooves to get lost). The walker can actually hold a few walking poses, and if you're careful can even work for stop-motion. The head connection can end up weak if you don't make sure the piece at the end of the neck is securely connected to the round bricks, but if you do make sure of that it stays on nicely. And you even get a speeder bike to play with. It was very much worth the $100 US it was priced for on release, and if you can get it for a non-insane price now would still be worth getting.

I recently got this set for my birthday, and put it aside because I thought that many of the pieces were missing. However, I began building it a few months ago and realized that I had nearly all of the pieces, and I finished it. Now to my list:

Pros

• -This early version of the AT-AT is nearly spot on, instantly recognizable.
  
• -The main body of the ship is extremely well-made, and I love the way to store your little stormtroopers inside.
  
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Cons

• -The head is rather fragile on the sides, better left alone.
  
• The legs feel...unaccomplished, mainly because of a lack of Technic gears or something.
  
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This set is great for play or display, and the overall set is nearly perfect;however, it does have its flaws, but they aren't really too bad.

I got this set in Christmas of 2004 and I instantly loved it even before I built it. Unfortunately I couldn't find one of the pieces in the set and I stopped building it for about three years until I found it in 2007. After that I discovered that it breaks very easily at the neck and falls apart if you don't handle it correctly. Besides this I think of it as my favorite Star Wars set.

this is a bit of a white elephant (funny that it looks like an elephant aswel). this set is amazing. i ahd many joyus hours of assembling it, and the sheer amount of pieces is phenominal. this set really captured the look of the AT-AT, yet still gave that the LEGO quality.
but there is a downside. it is a bit tricy to build, and there is so mutch going on, you sometimes miss out pieces, and there are some parts that fall off if you just look at them. therfore the playability is very very low. but they are very rare, and for someone like me i prefer this over the newer more child proof one.