Today's review is set 75199 General Grievous Combat Speeder that released in 2018. It retails for $29.99, has 157 pieces, includes 2 minifigures, and is from the Clone Wars. This recommended for ages 7+.

Grievous

Grievous has 4 arms that hold 2 blue and two green lightsabers. This is the white version of him, not the tan version. This is the same Grievous we got back then in 2014, so nothing really special about him

Mace Windu

He has front and back torso printing showing his tan robe. There is a brown belt surrounding his waist, and he has leg printing showing the lower part of the robe.

Combat Speeder

Grievous speeder has 2 red blasters under his speeder and there is a place where he can stand to drive the speeder. The front of the speeder looks very good using the royal guard staff Lego use back then in their early years of lego Star Wars. There are 2 big bulk engines in the back to help the speeder go and 2 nice and big side plates used on each side.

Overall review

The speeder is great and all but the minifigures are just horrible! I would recommend Ahsoka Tano and maybe add in the wookie youngling along with General Grievous, then it would be a great set. If you're a lego Star Wars fan then you can get the set if you like, but if you're a CLONE WARS FAN then I would NOT recommend this set for you, unless if you like terrible lego Star Wars sets.

Unless you're a die-hard Clone Wars fan, you could be forgiven for not recognising this unusual vehicle.Used by General Grievous in just two episodes of that cartoon. Chiefly used by the Confederacy of Independent Systems, there's little published information on this speeder.

The build itself is fairly straightforward, with the parts divided into two bags. There are four large stickers which require careful fitting, especially the two that go on curved slopes. Once built there is a place for General Grievous to stand (though he can't really hold onto anything) and an ingenious but simple method for storing his four lightsabres.

As for the figures themselves, they're the high point of the set. Mace Windu features a single facial expression (not that they had much choice!), and his distinctive purple-bladed lightsabre. Grievous himself is the highlight of the set, and a huge improvement over the original 2005 version. Special praise goes to the head, and the fact he comes with four lightsabres - two with green blades and two with blue.

For playability the vehicle is fairly swooshable, and can be displayed easily. It has two missile launchers, one under each large curved section. If you don't like this feature, you can just leave the missiles out. The launchers themselves are discreet, so don't intrude.

The set has one major issue that needs discussing - the price. Retailing at £25.99 in the UK, this set really doesn't feel like good value for money. I was fortunate enough to pick it up on clearance and I'd urge you to do the same if you want to add this set to your collection.

Overall this is a passable set, worth getting for the excellent minifigures if you can find it at the right price. The speeder itself isn't bad but is far from iconic, given how little screentime it enjoyed.

The droid army of the Confederacy of Independent Systems was lead by the cyborg General Grievous, a cruel machine who stocked his own personal fleet of impressive and bizarre vehicles. This set marks the third of these vehicles to be released - following the two releases of his TSMEU-6 personal wheel bike (7255: General Grievous Chase and 75040: General Grievous' Wheel Bike) and the two releases of his Belbullab-22 starfighter, the Soulless One (7656: General Grievous Starfighter and 8095: General Grievous' Starfighter) - representing his personal speeder, which appeared in the fifth season of the popular animated television show Star Wars: The Clone Wars, along with an appearance in the unfinished episodes which make up the seventh season.

When this set was announced, and leaks began to appear for the figures, I was thrilled. LEGO was releasing another set from the Clone Wars era, and it had an updated Mace Windu. It was only after the price was established, a whopping $29.99 in the United States, for a mere 157 pieces, that I realized this only looked good. Despite the price though, I had to get it. I waited though, hoping it would go on sale, and eventually broke down and requested it for my birthday.

Minifigures

The set contains two fairly popular characters from the show, and the pre-Galactic Empire era: Jedi Master Mace Windu, and General Grievous.

Master Windu's figure is entirely new, with exclusive prints on all three pieces that make up his character. The legs are no longer molded in white, and instead feature a band of white printing which depicts the pants worn under his sand yellow tunic. In my opinion, this design works far better than the previous design, which left the legs looking awkward from behind.

In addition, the updated torso features a very realistic looking design, with creases and natural folds in the fabric that the previous torso did not have, as it was based on his appearance in the Clone Wars TV show. The new design also features continued printed detail on the back side of the torso, a much needed improvement. Finally, Mace Windu's head is finally updated with an accurate representation of Samuel L. Jackson's face, a feature lacking in the previous head, reused from Seso in 2010's Prince of Persia theme.

General Grievous, on the other hand, is not new. His figure is the exact same as the one released in 2014's 75040. As such, one might expect the same high quality of plastic and detailing. As it turns out, I was to be disappointed. The plastic used in his torso and legs appears to be far flimsier and looser at the hinge points than the previous figure. His legs move far too loosely, and his primary two arms as well. All three of my previous General Grievous minifigures using this set of molds contained solid joints, and near perfect prints. In this particular example, the white print on the torso and arms were smudged and near illegible. Needless to say, I am very disappointed in this apparent drop in quality.

The Build

I want to preface this section by saying that it would be extremely hard for LEGO, using official building techniques, to accurately and proportionately depict this particular vehicle at a smaller scale. The odd angles and curves of the vehicle are extremely unique. And as such, I do need to commend LEGO for what they did, even if it is way out of scale. The choice of parts is reasonable, with the large angular wind deflector represented well, and the large curved slopes that form the sides add excellent shaping.

The biggest issue with the build in my opinion is the scaling of the engine module. The shaping and details are near perfect, but should be larger to more effectively fit the scale of the rest of the model. It feels like this portion was designed for a more accurately scaled to minifigures model, and added when no larger option was possible. It almost makes me wonder if there was a smaller design that was scraped in favor of this larger one, and the engine design was just carried over.

Conclusion and Final Statements

Upon building and experiencing this set, I very much felt that it is a solid design, and the minifigure selection makes the set pretty great for collectors. However, the price leaves a lot to be desired. This set could reasonably been sold for $19.99 in the U.S. for its 157 pieces, but $30 is asking too much. I have to caution an impulse buy on this set, as you will not be getting $30 worth of parts, or toy. I highly recommend waiting for this set to go on sale at your local retailer, or through LEGO itself. Unless you have a gift card sitting around with no other purpose, I wouldn't even recommend using that on this set. Quite simply, it is not worth $30.

However, if you are a collector who values completion, and desires to acquire items early to prepare for coming waves, then it might be worth getting soon, assuming you're willing to drop the money on it.

Once again, a pure cashgrab model. This is one of the rare occasions, I have to give a set less than three stars and unfortunately, most of the recent Star-Wars-sets would surely suffer the same fate...

Parts

Nothing special. A little Technic to support the structure followed by rather basic parts. The shooters are a welcome addition.

Minifigures

Two minifigures included, Mace Windu with his awesome cool purple lightsaber and a very much improved General Grievous. My first Grievous was from the 7656 set and it has changed A LOT since then! In fact, this particular minifigure made me give the set more than one star!

The build

Very, very simple. Took me 10 minutes while watching TV.

The completed model

While looking quite cool, you can see on first sight that this model has absolutely nothing special to it except its design. Only thing you can do is fire the "lasers". Furthermore, compared to the original design from TCW, it is waaay too big! Go search for pics on Google and you'll recognize!
Also, as in most recent SW-sets, the additional minifigure has no stand whatsoever and could easily get lost. Why not throw in a piece of "rock" or "ground" made of a few bricks to put Mace on?? Every simple City-set has something like that!?

Overall opinion

There's really not much to add. While the minifigures (especially Grievous) are quite cool, the Speeder itself lacks everything that makes a good SW-model for me. No functions but lasers, wannabe cool design but not matching the original and being way too overprized. I got it for 17€ on a special sale, but I have to say it was hardly worth it.
That's just one more stone breaking from the mosaic of epic LEGO-SW-sets...

*Edit*: I just got to put this "set" next to the 60138 Speed Chase from 2017 and it is ridiculous: I got both these sets for the same price! And - just look it up - there is MUCH more to the city set than to the SW-set... *rollseyes*