Budget Brick Review - Weagle Police Roadblock
Hey everybody, it's revue time again!
It's the oddly named 'Police Roadblock' from Weagle(TM). This set I bought at a branch of Wilkinsons (I think). Being bought in a proper shop, not a pound store or Ebay, this set should be one of the better ones, right?
The back of the box shows the same scene, only with an additional car, two more minifigures and a no u-turns sign, much the same way that some Lego sets will show an additional action scene on the box with three of four different sets combined. Only this time there's not much action and the scene is made up from multiple photos, which aren't to scale and are at crazy angles instead.
The top of the box shows the car and one of the two figures from the front again. The police driver is clearly another Oxford clone and a pretty decent one if we believe the photo. That said if you believe the product photo on a box of pretty much anything then you've either been incredibly lucky or are very bad at learning from experience.
The side of the box has some slightly awkwardly worded bullet points down the side.
Enhance Creative Mind: Construction toys can help exercise creativity and imagination. I'll give them that.
Enhance Motor Skills: Well, I suppose you need pretty good motor skills to assemble small pieces of plastic together into cars and stuff so that's pretty fair as well.
Enhance Sense of World: I think the creators of this set may want to enhance their own sense of the world a little before trying to enhance anyone else's. I think the only time I can imagine seeing that thing on a road is being driven around by security at a Japanese theme park. It looks like a sci-fi pedal car and I'd hate to think of kids growing up thinking that's what real police cars look like.
Moving on, opening up the box reveals this very sturdy cardboard inner, which to be honest is probably a little over the top and wasteful on their part, and a couple of bags of parts. Underneath the bags is the instruction sheet. So far, so good.
In my earlier review of the Oxford impulse packs I mentioned that I really liked the open backed bricks with the grill effect on the front that they do and how I'd really like to get a few of them in some more useable colours. Well, look what I found!
It's just a shame that they're absolutely rubbish. Let's take a closer look.
Oh my, that is absolutely, completely, undoubtedly, without question horrendous. It's icky. It looks like it has some sort of disease. That's what a Lego brick suffering from a skin complaint would like.
At least I got a few 1x1 bricks with a stud on the side. They're always useful.
They don't look too bad either. A little iffy around the corner there, but otherwise they look... oh...
Well, terrible frankly.
Enough of these moulding issues for now, what about the minifigures? What are they like, huh?
Ah, well. It's at this point a certain disclaimer on the box comes into play.
What does this statement mean? Well, firstly it means they haven't actually included any minifigures at all. None, zilch, nada, nil, zero. They didn't include a single one. It also means that colours are seriously out of the window. Oh, they do stick to the same selection of colours as on the box. They just don't bother to match the colours to the parts.
For example, reality:
And what the box would have you believe you're getting:
Yeah...
At least that's the right part, though. I mean, just including a completely different mould to what's on the box and in the instructions would really suck.
That is not the chair that's in the instructions.
These are funky though. I like this part. Sure, these examples have some minor moulding issues and the blue plastic isn't quite the right colour, but I'm still more than happy to get a couple of these added to my parts boxes and in comparison to some parts in this set those pieces are simply brilliant. For a start it doesn't look like someone's been trying to melt them.
All four of the wheel arches are like that. That's just nasty.
WHY IS IT THAT COLOUR!?
I'm not sure if that one's worse. See, it's less functional that the wheel arch, but at least it doesn't give me an urge to go grab the various bottles of disinfectant from the kitchen cupboard, don a disposable glove and carefully move it to the bin for safe removal from the house.
Right, that's enough of moulding issues, discolouration, mismatched parts and misleading artwork. Let's get on to the model itself.
For some reason the instructions tell you to put together two of those, stacks of three 2x6 plates, in order to make what is essentially two 2x6 bricks. Why? So they could get the part count up maybe? But do you know how else you could get the part count up? Sticking some minifigures in the damned box, that's how.
So why don't we have a look at the car?
This is how far I got before realising that a) the police car couldn't actually be made with the parts included and b) that the instruction sheet actually has mistakes in anyway that mean that you have to undo part of what you've done in order to finish the model, assuming of course you have all of the parts in the instructions that is. What an absolute load of rubbish!
I decided to make my own little car instead , one that represents in design the same care and quality that is represented in the parts themselves.
I even had all these parts left over afterwards.
Actually, you know what? That design is actually too good for this set. To make it match this disaster of a set I'd probably have to put the wheels on the top and the seat in front of the windscreen with most of the rest of the parts just piled up into a really tall stack. That would probably be a fair match for it.
This set scores -3/10, because I suspect it may actually be a biohazard.
Blarg.
To make up for the horrid travesty that was today's set here's a photo of my latest Hello Kitty figure, which turned up in the morning mail while I was working on shooting the photos for this review amongst others.
Aww... That's much better. Now where's the black sacks so I can dispose of those wheel arches.