Not-Lego: The MyBuild Engineer T2 5014

You know, these are extremely fun ways to spend an afternoon. I need to be careful, this is habit forming.

However, there were a couple of minor irritations here. For one, the product renders make it look like the robot is in high visibility neon, when it's more of a JCB yellow. Good thing I like those colours. The other was an inexplicable white speckling on a black piece. Never seen that before. None of this is significant, but still a downer.

As this is the 3rd I've built, I suppose I should ask the obvious question, is this getting a bit samey? Truthfully, a bit. All of these largely boil down to a layering of thin/smooth pieces to armour the limbs, with its body being designed to hold an omitted mini-figure. The differences between them do tend to be a matter of visuals and price bracket. Fortunately, the Engineer T2 does have the visuals. Its undeniably a plant vehicle, with squat proportions, safety lights, and no head. It even comes with a barrier and traffic cones, which is adorable. It's variant of the Mecha Frame meanwhile has an odd quirk. It ends up with some curious offset knees that end up very limited in the full build. That is however fixable, and I see this working well for amphibious designs or aggressively armoured ones.

All-in-all? Another fun distraction, but I think I might have to get more ambitious next time

 

 

Not-Lego: The MyBuild Mecha Frame Titan 6012

So, I got this immediately after the Sergeant because I was so impressed. Did it live up to expectations? Yes. But let's talk a little more about why.

The Titan is the largest single robot in the line, if you define things in the purely humanoid sense. They also do scorpions and robot/support-vehicle sets, but even then the Titan is relatively titanic. The Mecha frame is basically the same as the Sergeant, but it uses more of the 2x2 blocks and various extenders. A pilot figure is again omitted, but if you have one you'll notice it sits in the belly rather than the upper chest. Everything is just, more. The body is more built up and opens from the front. It's legs are rather thick, putting me in mind of Front Mission or Heavy Gear with its toes and shoulder weapons. The arms match everything else, going for a fashionable asymmetry, with twin machine guns on the right. It's about a third bigger overall than the Sergeant, while its head is about the same, making it look more  threatening through both proportions and sheer mass. If Sarge is a medium, this is a heavy. Its a good look.

Functionally it doesn't disappoint either. You gain finger joints, toe joints, and you can just about pull off a high kick. It's not super-posable, but this is one of those situations where you don't reasonably expect it. It's made of not-Lego and is built like a tank, how posable can it be without spoiling the effect? Or hitting a physical limitation of the medium? It can certainly wield its assorted weapons well, although this is an area where they maybe cheat a bit. There's a few plastic rods acting as gunbarrels and structural support for the Hammer. 

 

 

All-in-all? A lot of fun.

 

 

Not-Lego: The MyBuild Mecha Frame Sergeant 5011

Yes. Lego + mecha, twas only a matter of time. So, do I need context? Building bricks, or to acknowledge the brand leader, legos, are something which I imagine everyone knows even if they don't take an active interest. Even if you don't build yourself, the odds are you know it as THE multi-franchise toy merchandising brand, with an unusually good 2014 film. However, the Lego company proper did not make this, their patents expired in 2011, although there was legal drama. A company out of Taiwan made this, one of no doubt dozens easily dismissed as bandwagon jumpers. MyBuild does however seem to be something of an innovator, although I don't have much experience with third party bricks or proper lego, so I could be wrong. 

 

 

Now, the main thing here is the "Mecha Frame", a name both generic and completely accurate. It's this that imparts the fundamental robotness of the enterprise, granting some impressively robust joints. I did have a concern at first that this would somehow be cheating, and yeah, it does a little. The cockpit block is a V shaped piece of only one obvious use, but the bits that actually move are adaptable as real legos. This holds true for the set in general. For comparative purposes, this was more than twice the price of those Superhero mechs Lego does currently, but seems to be closer to their £18 price bracket in terms of complexity and quality. Part count was surprisingly high, and while I suggest shopping around, this does feel like a product aiming to exceed Lego in a fairly specific way, not merely undercut them. There's even hints of an anime-style fiction on the box.

As an experience, this as not so much "up my street", as "awaiting at my door with take-out food”. There's a feeling like, I dunno, some lego competition winner was approached by the company and given free reign to design around the frame. It is impressively complex, but never intimidating. There's a big focus on exploiting plastic colours, giving it a digital camouflage look, with mechanical greeblies in the corners. I did have some problems matching said colours to the manual at times, but nothing serious. Posability meanwhile is largely ideal, being able to balance on one leg without issue. And then there's the features. You get to build two submachine guns, a rotary grenade launcher, a largely decorative bayonet, some kind of paratrooper kit, and options for variants. I've spent a lot more to get less. The only complaint I have is that the set omitted a pilot figure, which prompted a scrabbling through my desk drawers. It's now used by Julius Caesar.

Then I got another!