Ironman: Grey – LEGO Super Heroes, Iron Monger Mayhem (76190)

I have this weird quirk where occasionally get a bit obsessive about things, so after my brother got me Captain Carter & The Hydra Stomper (76201) and I started exploring the subject a bit further, that ticking in my brain began again and I needed to resolve it. you know, it’s that weird cycle of pondering how useful parts could be, how much fun building could be, how a model compares to another or whether the minifigures have any value later on. That and of course the ongoing situation where you sometimes just don’t know what to buy because everything you actually wanted seems out of stock and then you compromise and settle on something else. All these reasons contributed to the LEGO Super Heroes Iron Monger Mayhem (76190) finding its way into my home.

Pricing and Contents

Unlike the green Hydra Stomper, this set is not exclusive to LEGO‘s own stores and a handful of retail partners and thus widely available. That doesn’t mean that it comes cheap, though. At 40 Euro suggested retail price it is still a bit of an investment even if for 479 pieces this technically isn’t a terrible price. However, with those mechs you always have to subtract a considerable number of those parts for the underlying structural elements for the joints and such vs. the “real” value of other elements used for actual shaping.

With the set being sold through regular channels, of course there’s the hope of discounts and typically those shave off around 10 Euro, bringing the cost down to a more acceptable 30 Euro. It still feels a tad expensive, but is okay for what’s on offer. Still, it would have been nice if this started out as something like a 32 Euro package and then the discounts would bring it below 25 Euro. The latter is not impossible, but rare and most likely will be limited to special events like this week’s Black/ Cyber/ Whatever week/ day.

Minifigures and Extras

The minifigures are unique to this set and should garner some interest from collectors, but undoubtedly Ironman himself will be the most coveted of the three. Completists will certainly want him, even if there’s already a myriad of variants out there. Still, I guess there’s always  still some mark of his armor that we haven’t seen yet and they can keep inventing new designs. This one is supposedly an Mk. 3 design, though I can’t really say much about it (yes, my general lack of knowledge of the Marvel universe striking again). To my uneducated eyes it looks believable, but I’ll leave that discussion to the real fans. The prints are at least very detailed and of good quality, surprisingly enough even in the white spots.

The Pepper Potts and Obadiah Stane figures are much less elaborate, but also well done. The evil dude hasn’t been done before and should prove popular, plus, which is perhaps something not to be underestimated, both figures look very generically usable with their suit & tie outfits. Having old Obadiah walk around your LEGO city as a regular business man is certainly not a far fetched idea. Same for the lady, give or take a few head and hair substitutions.

The set comes with a full deck of Trans Light Blue “energy effects” as they are called on Bricklink to simulate the blasts of Ironman taking off or throwing his energy plasma at bad guys. An additional large “pedestal” piece, only introduced this year is also included and you can see the noticeable difference in transparency.

A very welcome addition is the Black chest/ crate. The Reddish Brown and Medium Nougat versions are widespread enough, but other colors are much less common, often having been done only for a handful of sets. This Black one hasn’t been produced in over 15 years and only resurfaced this year. It wouldn’t be much trouble to buy some off Bricklink, but it’s still nice to be able add one to the collection this way without the extra hassle. the box serves as a container for the studs and tiles used by the shooters and comes with a number pad keyboard tile in the updated 2020/ 2021 design for the “locking mechanism”.

Piece Mania

To get this out of the way: One of the reasons I committed to this set were the Pearl Dark Grey elements. It’s a nice color to have to simulate all kinds of technical do-dads like cast-iron motors, Steampunk greebles and of course it would also make for a stunning car finish if only LEGO ever got around to produce more elements in this color. This model is at least a start with the recolored wedge piece and windshield. Other items include the 1 x 1 round studs and the 1 x 2 ingot/ gold bar element which I was so excited about to get some earlier this year when they were fresh on the market.

Another highlight are some Flat Silver pieces like the bar holder clip, another 2021 novelty recolor and the droid arms. Again more fodder for building fancy machinery and slowly things are beginning to get a bit consistent and make sense. Really nothing worse than having to settle for greys when you really want that metallic sheen to bring out details, if you know what I mean.

The Mech

Now let’s get one thing out of the way right away: In researching the original Iron Monger from the comics and movies I quickly realized that this mech barely qualifies to be called that. The proportions are all wrong with in particular the body in relation to the head not being bulky enough. The model likely would need to be a lot larger than the about 27 cm it is so it had more room to attach some larger wedge pieces and more slopes to truly give it the necessary volume.

However, that notwithstanding I’m not unhappy with the way this turned out. for one, it makes for a nice generic retro-themed mech and with that being the case it reminded me a lot of the one from the movie The Iron Giant, a truly underappreciated gem of classical animation. Especially the central structure of the trunk with the narrow hips, the rounded head and the exposed mechanical components struck a chord with me and are reminiscent of the film version even if they are not even trying to be exact renditions of that.

Similar to the green mech this one has very limited posing options. This time this isn’t so much about there not being provision for poseability – after all, this one has decent arm joints – but rather again the armor plates blocking each other and on top of it here the fake hydraulic pistons and scissor hinges further complicating matters. Like it or not, this is again pretty much a collectible display model that you should not touch too much after you have found a nice way to arrange everything. The package artwork is really misleading and that’s true for most of these mechs. Actually playing with them would be a pain and not very enjoyable except for a few static scenarios where the big guys are just standing around and firing off studs.

The detailing around the back is sufficient, with the two large pistons dominating the view. However, there clearly is not enough armor to protect the backside and this quite generally seems to be a problem with this model. If at all, it only represents the Iron Monger in half-finished state with several of the armor segments being missing or wrongly shaped. Most notably the distinct triangular “groin” armor shielding the lower section around the hip turntable is more or less absent on both the front and rear. This should have been easy enough to rectify with some wedge pieces to make it at least more dense and bulky.

On a similar note, the upper torso is not nearly bulbous enough, either. That would have been more difficult to get right, but here, too, I think just working some magic on the flanks with wedges or curved slopes might have greatly improved the overall look.

Speaking of major omissions – I can’t fathom why on earth the 3 x 3 tile for the arc reactor plate is not printed. not only is it highly regrettable, but it really also makes no sense technically, given that this element is specifically manufactured from Glow-in-the-Dark White just for this set, anyway. Applying the transparent sticker with the frame would not be the end of the world, but this is really a situation where one can only wonder about LEGO‘s strange logic.

The details on the arms and legs are adequate, but given the overall lack or articulation I feel that there could just have been a bit more in this department as well the large exposed ball joints and rigid knee construction are still very obvious and at the end of the day I’m always in favor of more details over more functions.

The cockpit is inevitably way too large due to the disproportionate head and lack of volume on the chest armor. Everything should look much more restricted and things get even weirder when you place a minifigure inside. Point in case: The model is already too large for proper minifig scale, but still too small to correctly render many of the critical shapes and details.

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Concluding Thoughts

A brief tongue-in-cheek summary of this review could be: Was the box labeled wrongly? This ultimately has very little in the way of actually representing the Iron Monger mech// armor suit and as such this comes across as a bit of a misnomer and trying to cash in on fans. I’m not going to say it’s a total rip-off, but fans of the movies and comics will no doubt be disappointed. The irony is that you can recognize some details, but the overall shaping of the central section is just not anywhere close to the real thing.

That said, and I already mentioned it, as a generic mech of a certain type this fares well enough, though even in this case I think most Ninjago mechs do better overall. It would be an interesting challenge to enhance this model to be more accurate and true to the films and that’s perfectly possible. At the same time you could totally go the other way, as somehow I feel oddly tempted to indeed try to use this as a basis for one of The Iron Giant robots.

I think your buying decision will really come down to where you stand on these matters. I can’t really recommend this to Marvel fans, but more generically inclined mech aficionados might get some enjoyment out of this, especially if they plan on fixing soem of the shortcomings.

Ironman: Green – LEGO Super Heroes, Captain Carter & The Hydra Stomper (76201)

The weird times we live in have some odd consequences for my LEGO consumption as well. When you go to the same shop week after week and the stock on the shelves just won’t change much simply because they are hopelessly backlogged on orders due to such short supply, you really begin to ponder picking up sets you otherwise might not have considered. The Captain Carter & The Hydra Stomper (76201) is such a set, even though at heart I’m still far from a Marvel fan.

Pricing and Contents

The purchase of this set came about as a dare challenge to my brother, who likes to poke fun at my LEGO obsession. I won’t go into the details of this weird dynamic, but suffice it to say that he sprang the money for it and that afternoon I was a happy boy when we left the drugstore with the package that had been lying there all those weeks already.

This set is semi-exclusive here in Germany, meaning you can only get it from LEGO directly and a few select retail partners. That makes any discussion of price moot on some level and with 30 Euro for 343 pieces it’s really not that much different than what you’re used to with most regular sets. We got lucky that week we bought it and only paid 25 Euro, which certainly helped to commit to this even if i didn’t have it on my radar before.

I’m sure that with more widespread distribution we’d see even better discounts. While the price-to-value ratio overall feels okay and on paper the usual metrics of price per piece and such add up, at the end of the day my impression is that 25 Euro is closer to what the set really should cost to begin with. The mech ultimately turns out pretty small and it doesn’t feel like there is enough volume to justify a higher price.

The Minifigures

No doubt the minifigures will be attractive to Marvel collectors and they appear all to be exclusive to this set and judging from Bricklink, their price can only go up from an already high base price. If you want all three, simply buying the whole set might be more cost effective. Since I still couldn’t get myself to sign up for at least a month or two to Disney+ to watch all the stuff, I’m still completely ignorant of the actual story threads. Based on the figure designs there seem to be a few things reversed, but not in a completely bonkers way. I’ll leave the details to the geeks that have actual knowledge of the comics and series.

The details are well-executed with some fine prints and in particular Steve Rogers in his regular army uniform before his Captain America days will be highly desirable. Red Skull has been done a number of times, but apparently this is the first time he also has prints on his feet. It’s also interesting that the Tesseract has been represented with a transparent Minecraft figure head. Some people have taken issue with this particular version of Captain Carter only being in this set and not the recent Collectible Minifigure series, but that’s life, I guess (and LEGO‘s usual sneaky tactics of scattering stuff across multiple sets so you have to buy them).

The Mech

The mech follows the mold established by the many smaller Ironman Hulkbuster models we got over the years. Now that blanket statement doesn’t do you much good since I haven’t reviewed any of them , but if you ever owned one of those, you pretty much know where this is going. The individual sub-assemblies are based on standardized building methods you have seen a million times, and to get this out of the way, overall poseability therefore is limited. The main trunk for instance is a solid piece with no turntable separating the hips and the upper abdomen/ thorax, so he can only ever stare forward.

The arms are more moveable on a theoretical level at least, but the massive armor plates easily get in the way. The shoulders are okay, but the elbows never allow to stretch the arms out fully. The legs have rigid knees, so they are always at an angle. This is not the end of the world, but has a noticeable impact on the model’s posture as it always leans forward ever so slightly. This basically can’t be changed as otherwise the mech loses balance and tips over backward. It’s not that its jet backpack would be particularly heavy or any of that, but more the combination of all the appendages somehow interacting unfavorably.

One thing that bothered me a bit from the outset was the color scheme. Initially I was under the impression that the model would come with Bright Green elements instead of the regular Green. Once I got to grips with that reality, I still wished it had at least a few such pieces and at the same time also a few other ones in Dark Tan or Olive Green. Since this is based on some sort of alternative timeline in which the bad guys from Hydra somehow have managed to assemble this Hulkbuster knock-off back in the 1940s, my theory would have to be that during wartime materials were in short supply and they had to scrape it together from different sources.

This doesn’t mean everything has to look like it was sourced from the scrapyard, but some color variations would certainly have enlivened the model and broken up the uniform green. It would also have helped to disguise the weak print on the face mask. It’s seriously lacking in opacity and neither the white areas nor the green looks correct. This is even more regrettable as somehow it would have been cool if the eyes would also be a Glow-in-the-Dark element. As it is, only a 1 x 2 plate hidden behind a Trans Light Blue tile on the chest plate is actually glowing. This kind of works, but only if you really have exposed it to a strong light source like a flashlight. Just letting it stand there in regular daylight will barely register.

The cockpit does not have any extra details and can hold a minifigure in standing position. that’s where Steve Rogers‘ printed on belts and buckles come into play to make him appear strapped in. That’s okay, but I definitely would have preferred some more detailing. Sadly, though, even that would not raise the play value by much as the whole model is simply stiff like a stick and does not offer many ways to set up play scenarios

All that being the case, the one benefit of this mech being rigid like a frozen fish is that it is also quite robust. It’s easy enough to rip off the lower arms when moving them because they are only attached with ratcheted hinges, but the rest is quite massive and will not break at the first fall.

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Concluding Thoughts

While I bought this (or my brother, to be exact) more or less just as a way to fill a gap when there were no other sets I wanted available at decent prices, this is still pretty decent, come to think of it. Compared to other Marvel sets the price isn’t inflated exorbitantly and while the model as a whole feels a bit small-ish, by that weird LEGO logic we have become accustomed to the value isn’t bad. Once you throw the very distinctly unique minifigures into the mix this gets even better. Splitting the investment with a friend who collects them should make this very viable.

On its own merits as in “a mech being a mech” this is not the best option, though. There’s still a ton of Ninjago mechs out there that offer much more complexity, are way larger and much better poseable plus they come with even more figures and better play value. This Hulkbuster wannabe really only works with the Marvel context in mind or if you are looking for a retro-themed, steampunk-ish model that fits into an alternate WW II scenario.

Small-ish Ghost Patrol – LEGO Hidden Side, Ghost Firetruck 3000 (70436)

After I’ve been a bit under the weather in the last two weeks and didn’t really get much done it’s time to pick up pace again on this here blog and what could be more fitting for the Halloween weekend than to have a look at another LEGO Hidden Side set with the Ghost Firetruck 3000 (70436).

Package and Contents

I got this set only very recently. I always kind of wanted it, but at the same time I never thought it would actually be worth a 70 Euro investment. I only jumped on to it when it dropped below 50 Euro. Aside from my overall cost-conscious approach to LEGO this simply had to do with the fact that it never felt essential within the Hidden Side series itself and in addition also didn’t look like it could hold up on its own as a standard fire truck to be used elsewhere. More on the specifics of that later on.

The other thing that I noticed when looking at the official marketing photos is that this model looked somehow oddly small next to the minifigures. You can even see this in my own overview shot. This also contributed to my reluctance and was confirmed once I had the model. The box it comes in is a rather pretentious affair in that it is being very wide and tall, but very flat, which always makes me suspicious. It’s the old gag of “Size does matter!” and I don’t like being lured into a false sense of scale by oversized boxes.

By comparison the model is indeed a bit on the tiny end. This is in particular disappointing as it doesn’t even match in scale with the Paranormal Intercept Bus 3000 (70423). At the very least this will impact play value should you or your kids decide to use both vehicles next to each other. I have no way of verifying any of this, but I would wager that you’d have similar issues with the ghost train, the school or other buildings. It may even look weird next to the Graveyard Mystery (70420) or the Wrecked Shrimp Boat (70419). So no matter what – something is wonky with the scale they chose.

The Minifigures

The figures are your run-off-the-mill standard Hidden Side crew – Jack, Parker, J.B. – complemented by a robot called TeeVee and on the opposing side a Shadow Walker. The robot doesn’t have a real torso but rather uses a 1 x 2 x 2 brick with studs on the side for the upper section and it’s face is created with two exchangeable printed 2 x 2 tiles. Sadly they are designed so unimaginatively, I was ready to throw them out immediately. They are pretty garbage and at this point I can’t imagine ever using them for anything.

The Monster

For once this set comes with a genuine monster by ways of Nehmaar Reem – The Harbinger, constructed from buildable parts. This, however, is yet another only half successful effort at best in my opinion.

I do understand the concept – some tentacles or strands of smoke/ some oily liquid form the limbs and then converge to form the torso – and it might even look pretty cool when animated in 3D inside a game or a movie with everything wobbling around and constantly re-forming itself, but as a physical object it looks utterly boring. Most notably there should be a lot of additional half-formed tentacles coming out of the ground and the main character be engulfed in them as well as having other little stuff on their ends like bats or lumps of “mud” that the creature tries to fling at the ghost hunters.

The biggest shortfall is however the head and I’m not even criticizing the color choice. A plain 2 x 2 round brick in Light Aqua doesn’t bother me. It just looks way too tiny and not the least bit scary here and I guess that is the point: It would have made a lot more sense if they had dug out an old Bionicle face mask like this one for instance. It looks positively alien-ish and creepy. Re-done in Black and Yellowish Green and combined with some glowy transparent color for the underlying head piece that apparently go with those masks this could have been pretty rad.

The Truck

The main item is recognizably modeled after an older General Motors fire truck from the 1970s and early 1980s. In theory that should be a good thing, as there’s a certain charme to those old rustic vehicles, but of course it is sort of ruined by all the add-ons.

The vehicle itself (minus the blue parts) represents some sort of mix between a ladder truck and an equipment truck with a large box/ container section. I’m not an expert on this stuff, but as far as I can tell such a hybrid could exist somewhere as some sort of specialized version e.g. with a big rigid float for water rescue operations covering up the rear deck and the equipment lockers therefore having to be shorter in order for the vehicle to not exceed height limits for driving under bridges and the like. It’s just one possible explanation, of course, and you can always craft your own story around that. Either way, in that regard the model is highly plausible.

As far as it remains visible, the shaping is done nicely all the way round, be that the driver’s cabin or the rounded edges at the top not least of all thanks to the 1 x 2 rounded bricks introduced two years ago.

The rear bumper, or for that matter the entire rear, loses quite a bit of its magic due to being split in the middle. As you may already have guessed, this has to do with these areas actually being parts of the mech folded onto the back of the chassis in a Transformers-like attempt to disguise themselves as normal sections of the car. Inherently the limitations in precision with plastic-based joints prevent the alignment from ever being truly one-hundred percent perfect and the crack can be easily seen most of the time, no matter how meticulously you push things into place. This could have benefited from a solution where the two halves actually interlock to stay straight.

A lot of the sides is covered up with the “junk” equipment used for ghost hunting and the bumper bars/ cages around the wheel wells. Those would be the first elements I’d remove to turn the car back into a regular fire truck, but then you would also have to replace the black wheel hubs with grey or metallic ones. If you will, there’s a bit of illusion painting going on here which only works with the bumpers in place.

The cockpit exterior is nice and the front believably looks like it could have originated in the 1980s. In fact in addition to the GM trucks this also reminds me of the similar Skoda fire trucks that I saw in my youth. The horns/ sirens are extremely exaggerated, but i think that this is appropriate and looks cool.

Splitting Up Together

As mentioned earlier, “the lady comes in two parts”, as they say with one being the truck undercarriage and the other the mech huddled together. once you remove it, a few things come to light or become accessible.

The first of those is the cockpit interior. It’s not impossible to remove the roof with the mech saddled up, but the big cannons tend to get in the way if you’re not careful. It’s much easier this way, even more so as I found the fit to be very tight and removal of the roof requiring some force and technique. The layout inside is pretty much identical to what you get in the yellow school bus from this series, with the area behind the driver’s seats occupied by a big computer workstation to track the ghosts. Unimaginative, but okay.

The rear section of the plain truck has some nice details indicating some sort of docking mechanism as you also would find it on cargo trucks. There is also some pretty elaborate tubing to hint at exhaust pipes and power ducts, but a lot of it is hidden behind the equipment shelves and beneath the color dial used for the interactive app. That way the two silver goblets used to hold the cones barely get their due.

Speaking of color dials, the big one behind the cockpit is pretty much Hidden Side 1:1 standard fare, but in a neat twist there are also additional markers on the sides that use the new cut-in-half round bricks I already was so fond of with the Supernatural Race Car (70434), only this time in Yellow.

Finally, the doors can be opened, of course, but again with the “cannons” in the way access to the interior might be finicky at best. Better to remove the roof entirely. On that note, the Red doors and train window panels likely should prove popular with train enthusiasts to some degree. The ones in this set even have actual glass elements in Trans Black already, making for excellent port hole windows e.g on the engine sections of some diesel locomotives.

The Mech

The worst part of the set, and I have to be honest here, is indeed the half-concocted mech. It literally has “We ran out of ideas, so let’s just do the umpteenth mech!” written all over it. Now perhaps I need to blame myself for having bought too many Ninjago mechs, but it’s getting a bit tiring – not so much the subject itself, but seeing the ever same interpretations and techniques being used in the LEGO world.

This particular model is reminiscent of the smaller tactical mechs found in some older Mechwarrior games and similar – open cockpit areas, ridiculously oversized guns (or rocket launchers) and overall rather barebones with critical parts like hinges hopelessly exposed to enemy fire.

In its folded up posture this constitutes the whole rear section of the fire truck and basically just looks like one big gun. It’s held in place by the few exposed studs you saw further above on the truck’s chassis frame. This works okay if you press things down neatly and don’t mess around too much, but for my taste the mech comes off too easily, not to speak of the symmetry alignment issues I also already mentioned earlier.

Posing the mech is far from easy and essentially the pose you see in the images is the maximum of how you can spread the legs to appear somewhat dynamic without the whole shebang tipping over. Sadly the model copies the “stiff knee” approach LEGO have adapted for Ninjago et al, meaning the knee joint is missing and instead there’s a fixed ninety degree angle, and as a result due to the shortness of the legs there is very limited freedom of movement to get this balanced nicely.

One good thing, and ultimately one of the reasons I took the plunge to get this set, after all, is the plethora of parts in Dark Azure. That also includes parts of the large joints, which in my book counts as an extraordinary event. Usually LEGO doesn’t bother to color them consistently with the model and will opt to go the standard route by using the stock Dark Bluish Grey, Light Bluish Grey and Black versions, so this is indeed something worth pointing out specifically.

 

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Concluding Thoughts

As I wrote in the introduction, this is in no way essential to have, well-executed as some parts of it may be. It doesn’t do much for Hidden Side and converting it to a more regular fire truck for a city scenario, while not impossible, would require some not so minor effort to replace the mech sections and convert them into standard superstructures. Ultimately that’s perhaps the point: A more conventional design with a ladder or just a large tank and water guns would have been more useful from the outset and looked the better for it. The mech somehow doesn’t cut it at all and only disturbs what otherwise could have been a nice fire fighting vehicle to hose down them ghost’s…