Budget Brick Review - Wange Pirates Raid, Invincible Pirates Chariots

There's two firsts in today's review. It's my first review of a pirate set and my first review of anything put out by a company called Wange.

These things usually come in really nice boxes with the figure being displayed through a little window, but because I'm on a budget here I bought one off eBay without a box to save money. The first two things to note about this set are that the figure is a completely different style to any I've looked at before and the set itself has more than a little influence from the Lego Pirates Gun Cart set.

Everything other than the figure comes in the one, massively oversized, bag.

The instructions are pretty straight forward. I'm not a fan of the flag construction though. Personally I would much prefer it if they actually included a flag of some description not just a 2x2 printed plate and a couple of bits to stick on the back of it.

Bizarrely, there are full instructions for putting the figure together when the figure is assembled already in the box.

There really aren't that many pieces in this set, but the figure's pretty interesting looking.

I've never seen this design figure outside of Wange's sets, so as far as I can tell this is an original design to them. Has anyone seen them anywhere else? I'd be interested to know. I quite like the style of the arms. The legs on the other hand are a whole different matter. I'm not much of a fan of them, specially from the back. Actually, I'm not a fan of much about that figure from the back. It's quite unusual to see printing on both sides of the torso with cheaper figures, so it's a bit disappointing and frankly kinda weird, that Wange has chosen to stick their logo on the back of their figures and it's not just this one. I've got another two Wange sets still to review and they've also got the logo on the back of the figures. It ruins them a bit in my opinion.

Compatibility. As you can no doubt see, leg compatibility between Lego and Wange figures only works one way. The Wange torsos just come in at two sharp an angle for the Lego legs to fit properly. Heads are in no way compatible, but headgear is. The only problem I had it terms of swapping around headgear is the fact that some Lego headgear comes down too low and covers up the Wange figure's eyes.

The Wange* guns are pretty nice even if my camera did do it's best to emphasise every tiny flaw in them. Again, they're not a part I've ever seen anywhere else before.

(How are you supposed to pronounce that anyway? Is that a hard or soft G? Long or short E? I have no idea.)

The 1x4 brown tile looks a bit scratched there. It's a pretty good match for the plastic used in the brown Enlighten sandbags, but not so much for the Lego or Click Brick pieces there.

The black parts aren't of the highest quality unfortunately, but I did notice something interesting regarding the studs. Some parts had ones with WG on and some didn't have any identifying marks. All the parts have those indentations on some of the studs though. Are they from a different factory? Are they from the same factory, but with the unbranded parts originally destined to go elsewhere? It's a mystery.

Well, there it is, the final model. Now, overall opinions. It's not a bad set. I don't like those legs and the logo printed on the back just strikes me as an odd thing to do, but the guns are nice, the wheels are a good quality and I'd say overall the set is pretty decent. If you can pick it up for about two pounds / three dollars or less and you fancy a couple of those nifty looking guns I'd say go for it.