This is the first UCS set I've ever bought and built, so I have no personal frame of reference, but I'm very happy with this.

The build took me about 5-6 hours, which was honestly faster than expected. The build is broken up into 11 bags and the first half is incredibly simple bricks-and-plates-studs-on-top-construction, followed by some considerably trickier techniques in the latter stages. The front end is built separately and attached with ball joints, and as many have pointed out, the horizontal tubing is not clipped to anything, using simple friction to stay secure. I fiddled with it for some time trying to get it all perfectly even before realising it's not even perfect on the box art and called it a day. The back panels don't feel very secure but have never actually fallen off on me. My canopy piece came wrapped in a special protective layer, but I have heard conflicting reports of this not being the case for some people.

The fact that this UCS set has stickers at all is pretty annoying, but they ended up being not as much of a pain as I initially expected. The trick for the giant ones on the front is to line up the edge vertically with the brick so that there's no 'angle' as you apply it down the rest of the piece. The plaque also wasn't that bad. It's just a simple rectangle, even if 20x the size I'm used to.

The minifigures aren't what you're buying this set for. The fact that this Luke doesn't have the cool poncho cloth that came in the 2020 Landspeeder is a letdown. C-3PO on the other hand is this close to being perfect. Unfortunately, the silver leg isn't actually silver, rather LBG with silver print. I can only assume that LEGO tried dual moulding with pearl silver and it didn't work, either that or they're holding out on us for some future set. Other than that, the arm and side leg printing make this an incredibly premium feeling figure, and the definitive version to have. As it should be.

Last section, price. I paid $180 for this (as well as getting $18 worth of points back) on LEGO dot com on early Black Friday deal. I have seen similar prices on Amazon in recent months. For that price, it is *barely* a good deal in my opinion. The fact that this set got a 20% price hike from 200 to 240 instead of a 20% price cut was absurd. If you get it for $240 you're getting ripped off. No buts. If you get it for $180-200, you're getting a fair deal (at least in LEGO terms) and anything less than that is the gravy zone.

So... is it good? Absolutely. I feel like I've done nothing but complain here. The build is half simple and half borderline frustrating. There are stickers. The Luke figure sucks. It's annoyingly priced. And, yet, the classic, solid, dare I say beautiful, finished model manages to make up for all of it. Unlike far too many sets, it nails the basics. There's no wonky proportions, no off color choices, no missing details. Also, I feel like nobody's mentioned this, but I think one of my favorite things is just the size. It has a certain level of presence not found in many LEGO models, without being unwieldy.

It shouldn't be good, but it is. It feels like a lot of UCS fans are skipping this one. Don't.

CapnRex101's excellent review of this set really describes it well, so I'm just sharing a few post-build details:

• The body is incredibly dense and solid. Layer upon layer of plates, with very few small pockets of empty space. The curved front portion is equally solid, though an entirely separate build, connected via ball joints. Their connection is fairly secure, but supplemented with plates after attachment, so there's absolutely no wiggle.

• The raised 1x2 plate on the hood is irritating; it has no notches to center it over the stud, so in addition to being "spinnable," it's also "slidable." Eyeballing its position is the best you can do.

• The two stickers on the front curved plates are almost criminal. Anyone can place a sticker, but placing it well is another story, and stickers this long and narrow, over such a wide curve, are all but impossible to line up perfectly. The stickers on the engines are an irritation, but with patience and a steady hand, they can be placed perfectly.

• All three engines look great, especially the port engine with its missing cowl. Each engine is attached with a different mechanism, and all three are terrible. The port engine is the most solidly attached, using Technic pins. It still wobbles, but barely. The starboard engine inexplicably uses three white lightsaber rods, resulting in a very wobbly connection. The top engine uses Technic pins as well, but sits too loosely on them, resulting in the worst wobble of the three. All three of these issues could have been fixed by adding plates to the mix to shore up the rigidity of the connections.

• The silver tubes running along the sides look brilliant, but they barely fit. The vertical space is ever-so-slightly too small for the stack of five, so one of them is always trying to burst free. And they're just a tiny bit too short -- they fit as shown, but sliding them just a millimeter or two in either direction can be enough to cause one to spring loose. The pressure they exert on the front "grill" piece is considerable, but that piece is well attached and won't break free. (The greeble bits decorating the grill are not well attached, and when one of the tubes sprang free, I eventually found the tiny piece across the room.)

• Additionally, the area behind the tubes along the front curved section is empty, so colored bricks are visible behind them. The embedded horizontal ladders on either side look good and arguably help keep the tubes in place, but they aren't fixed solidly and swing to and fro at a touch.

• The back panels (beneath the rear engine), attached via SNOT, are reasonably solid but also wobble slightly.

As a display piece the wobbliness of the engines likely won't matter, but for this extremely premium price, it's reasonable to expect better, especially considering how fixable this problem would have been during development.

The completed model is a striking piece. Even after seeing lots of images, I was surprised at how big it is. It's truly a fantastic rendition of Luke's landspeeder. Its substantial weight is incredibly satisfying to hold. The exclusive C-3PO minifigure is also a treat; kudos to Lego for getting the front/side prints of his feet lined up so precisely.