A good mini build with the best "planet" through series three.

Box/Instructions

Standard planet box that still unfortunately leaves the planet exposed to scratching. Instruction booklet is folded in half but otherwise nondescript.

Parts

Has a great selection of SNOT pieces. The highlight has to be a printed mini TIE cockpit piece. Death Star is excellent and thus far the only asymmetric planet.

Minifigures

The TIE pilot has a great looking front printed torso and helmet.

The build

A quick build with symmetry that might be repetitive to some. Nothing really out of the ordinary except for the one stud in the middle of four (like 5 on a die or body centered cubic to the nerds).

The completed model

The cockpit has a rather squarish appearance despite the designers best efforts to use disks attempt a spherical shape. It looks somewhat like a TIE X-wing rather than two wings. Nevertheless, it is instantly recognizable as a TIE interceptor.

Summary

Mini build is good looking despite the squarish cockpit and contains many useful pieces. Minifig is excellent. Swooshable mini build and mini Death Star. The top half of the Death Star makes a decent R2 head. I'm sure there are many other uses. This is a must by.

Must have set.

Specially the death star ball is really nice.

At the beginning i was not very convinced in have all the planet series but i have to admitt that they look really well.

What an awesome set! It costs nothing, next to other sets, and you get the death star!!

It's hardly worth commenting on the build, and be honest, you didn't buy it for the ship did you...

Pros

• That 'planet' - makes the rest of the planets in the range look pointless.
• The mini TIE interceptor is quite cute!

Cons

• Difficult to display the Death Star properly - it's too heavy for blue tack and thread to hold it. Some way to reverse the studs so it could be stuck onto a tower would be useful (I did it by cutting up a 2x2 brick!)

You get the Death Star!
Sorry this isn't more informative, there isn't all that much you can say about a 50 piece ship. And again, you aren't buying it for the ship are you...

A couple of days ago I reviewed the Naboo set from the new 'Planets' series, set #9674, which included some general comments about the series: see http://www.brickset.com/reviews/?ID=42350

Basically I said that these 'Planets' sets are a cool and striking idea, and I found it an enjoyable way to spend 20 minutes, at the very least. I noted that it's more a thing to be admired than to be played with, really. And I observed that it's a bit odd to get a set with things on three completely different scales: a planet, on what would have to be called megamicro scale, a starship, at micro scale, and a minifig, which - unlike everything else in the set - is (of course) on minifig scale.

The set with the slightly strange title of 'Naboo Starfighter & Naboo' was nicely colourful. But 'TIE Interceptor & Death Star' is, predictably, all blacks and greys.

The planet in this set, is, of course, not a planet ("That's no moon," as Obi-Wan famously murmurs). I wondered if LEGO would have bothered having that indented circle thing, which the massive energy beam shoots out from in the films, or if they would just do a sphere. But of *course* LEGO have done it properly. So the Death Star looks very good. I had sort of assumed that all of the planets in the 'Planets' series would be a bit of a waste of space, in terms of whether you could use them for anything after building the set, but it seems possible that you might be able to use the Death Star for something. Can't quite think what, at the moment. Except, of course, for being a rather cool Death Star.

The spaceship here, the TIE Interceptor, is a good demonstration of how you can do a very cool spaceship in relatively few pieces of LEGO. Being small, it's inevitably a bit underwhelming. But it's neat.

The minifig in this set, the TIE Fighter Pilot, is good, with nice silver printing, although the helmet looks slightly massive compared to the rest of the guy. But he's cool, and best of all is that *finally* - as Huw unveiled on Brickset a few days ago - the LEGO designers have acknowledged that LEGO Star Wars stormtroopers (and their, er, colleagues, like this pilot) are human beings and therefore should have faces. I always thought it was really bad, before, that clone troopers and stormtroopers would have black blobs instead of heads under their helmets. It seemed unusually odd and lazy of LEGO, to not even give them heads, since we know these guys do *have* heads under their helmets! So apparently, from now on, these guys will have actual heads. Excellent.

Overall, then: Well, this is inevitably the most 'classic' of the first three 'Planets' sets, as it comes with the Death Star from the much-loved first Star Wars movie, and a classic vehicle and minifig. Surprisingly, perhaps, I think I probably preferred the Naboo set, with its good rich colours, over this one - the black and grey is less stimulating. But this is a fun (if very easy and quick) build, and it's still cool to get a planet and all the stuff inside the planet - like an Easter egg - and ... well, it's worth £10 of anyone's money.

First off the pilot figure is terrific looking. Out of my collection i have now, i really only think my Overwatch Tracer and Widowmaker figures compare. The Tie Interceptor is more detailed then 30381. It is a bit smaller. But i preferred 30381. Who ever built it first (we found this laying around partially assembled ) had put the slopes on backwards so you might want to watch out for that, but it's also rather obviously visually that somethings wrong if you put them on the wrong way. The other thing is if you adjust the wings at all either the slopes, or the entire wing assembly tend to go flying off. It's a bit hard to get the Tie interceptor to sit on it's base. One final thing i kept trying to open the Death Star by turning it, you need to gently squeeze the bottom half to get it open.