I missed out on getting both of the previous Droid Tri-Fighter sets (7252 from the Revenge of the Sith lineup and 8086 from The Clone Wars).when they were available at stores, a disappointment since I thought the Tri-Fighters were pretty neat. I was happy to discover this set had been released as part of revisiting RotS, and I did not balk at the $30 price since at the time every eBay BIN listing I could find for the past sets was that or more. The next time I cashed the recycling in, the Tri-Fighter was my purchase of choice.

Box/Instructions

The box is made of the heavier cardboard that LEGO uses these days. It's in the 2014 style, which means dark blue borders and a non-LEGO Darth Vader reaching out to choke you. The front shows the Tri-Fighter racing through the Battle of Coruscant dodging Republic fighters' lasers, as well as a small panel at the bottom with a gallery of minifigs. The back shows a picture of the fighter landed on a platform at what seems to be Mustafar, with some overlayed panels demonstrating features of the ship. Off to the side on the back are pictures of the Tri-Fighter from different views, and a bordered picture of the ship seen from a rear angle. The sides have copyright and safety information, as well as a 1:1 "Character card" image of the Palpatine minifigure.

Parts

The parts selection is pretty decent, though some iffy color choices are made. The biggest standouts are the ratchet-hinged sphere halves that make up the central ball section and the trio of studded tri-blade propellers that hold the whole thing together. There are several ratchet hinge bricks, video camera pieces, and dark blue and dark gray plates and tiles for making the "arms". While the pieces chosen are better than what 8086 picked, that set's mistake regarding palette is repeated. Looking at the Tri-fighters in both movie and show, there needed to be some light gray, and it's sand blue that should dominate the livery with dark blue being an accent color. 7252 from 2005 and 75014 Vulture Droid from the same year as this set included the sand blue, but this one didn't even have any on the sticker sheet so I'm left tilting my head. One other negative with the parts: No flick-fire missiles or other parts to really represent something. Getting back to non-negative stuff, this set includes 2x3 cowling/armor bricks to go on the engines, red cones for the laser cannon tips (an interesting choice given the general move away from that), a 1x4 shooter brick and three red missiles for it, and assorted other rods and struts and things.

There is also a sticker sheet, as one wold expect. It has the Confederacy of Independent Systems logos for the fighter as well as "accordion"-joint decals to go on the 2x4 black tiles in the middle of the arms. A nice touch, that.

Minifigures

There are three true minifgures included as well as one built-figure. The regular minifigures are: A regular Battle Droid with a straight arm for holding a medium-size blaster, a security Battle droid with the same, and Chancellor Palpatine in the robe he was wearing when Grievous abducted him. Palpatine is not using his unique hair piece in this set, instead wearing one chosen to represent his shorter hair in Episode III. His head has two face prints, one with quasi-neutral frowning expression and the other smirking evilly.

The built-figure is a Buzz Droid, redesigned for 2014 to be more accurate and somewhat more compact than the previous design (seen in 7252 and in 7751 Ahsoka's Starfighter & Droids). It uses the small flexible lever/antenna pieces instead of battle droid legs, and a zipline brake for the proboscis instead of a minifig buzzsaw. A still-more-accurate design might be possible, but this is a decided improvement.

The build

The build is repetitive, due to the three mostly-identical "arms" of the fighter, but LEGO once again proves their knack for making repetition enjoyable. There are a couple of clever tricks employed to get parts where they need to go.

The completed model

The complete model is fairly sturdy. The arms lock solidly into their proper position, and nothing is really likely to fall off. Unlike previous iterations it was unable to use Bohrok eyes, but it manages to get by with cheese slopes. The shooter brick is located such that it's easy to load and fire. Aside from the color issue it looks very good, with the arms not suffering from the gaps that 8086's did. There is one thing 8086 did that I wish this set had done, though: 8086 used two flick-fire missiles, some rods, and some 1x1 cone and cylinder bricks to create functional representations of the Tri-Fighter's prominent underslung missiles. While this does have an underslung shooter brick, it has no real representation of the missiles (functional or otherwise). About the only function issue is clearance and alignment with the halves of the central sphere, but that's pretty negligible.

It's a lot beefier than the 2005 set, making it seem less shrimpy next to fellow more modern sets like the 2014 Vulture Droid or Obi-Wan's Jedi Interceptor from 2016.

Overall opinion

Even with the color issue, I found this was worth getting when it was on store shelves. It was well-designed, fun, and getting an official Palpatine was a nice bonus. And secondary market prices for the previous two Tri-Fighter sets being what they were at the time, it was certainly the most bang for my buck. Now that this set is off the shelves, things are a tad different. Prices on the other two have gone down and they're still decent enough sets, so if you just want a Tri-Fighter at all I wouldn't say this is a must-have. It does have its upsides, though, so if you can find a good loose one where the fighter itself is complete then that's definitely worth getting. Not sure it's worth going after MISB at secondary market prices, though.