Thanks to our friends at DK Books we have been checking out their new LEGO Build Your Own Adventures titles ahead if their release on Tuesday. Previous titles have been based on LEGO themes such has Friends, City, NINJAGO and Star Wars. With each featuring a book full of inspirational build ideas and an exclusive LEGO set. Two new titles join the line-up this year, the first of which is LEGO DC Comics Super Heroes Build Your Own Adventure. This includes a rather special exclusive minifigure, in the form of the John Stewart version of Green Lantern, along with a spaceship minibuild. So let’s take a closer look at this fun new book from DK.
Product Description
Combines more than 50 inspirational LEGO® ideas for building with enthralling LEGO DC Super Heroes story starters. Get inspired to build, then play out your own adventures using your LEGO bricks. Comes with a minifigure and bricks to build an exclusive spaceship model that features in the book.
From Paradise Island the home of Wonder Woman™ to the search for Superman™ in Metropolis each chapter of LEGO DC Super Heroes Build your Own Adventure is packed with inspirational model ideas ideal for all ages and building abilities, with a mix of easy, medium and harder models.
- Book Title: LEGO DC Comics Super Heroes Build Your Own Adventure
- Set Number: 11914
- Set Name: Green Lantern & Spaceship
- Pieces: 84
- Pages: 80
- RRP: £17.99
- ISBN: 9781465460899
The Book
As with previous Build Your Own Adventure titles, the focus of the book is to provide readers with build ideas via a series of inspirational models, which have once again created by fan builder Rod Gillies, who has worked with DK on a number of their previous LEGO titles, including last years LEGO Star Wars Build Your Own Adventure. Rod has created around 50 builds which can be created using your own collection of LEGO bricks. Although there aren’t any build instructions for these inspirational models, they are simple enough for builders of all ages to try out for themselves.
The book is split into five chapters Paradise Island, Central City, Icy Adventure, Search for Superman and Lex’s Lair. The book isn’t just a random selection of builds, they are nicely tied together with a basic story, told across those chapters, which join Green Lantern has he travels through the DC universe, visiting various well known areas connected to the rest of the Justice League. This cleverly allows for a wide range of inspirational models to be featured.
There may not be step-by-step build instructions however some elements of the inspirational builds are broken down to show how they are pieced together or which elements you may need. Plus there are plenty of little annotations dotted throughout. Even if you don’t have the exact bricks to build what’s shown in the book, you can simply use your own creativity, which is the aim of the book.
The beginning of the book does include proper step-by-step instructions for the spaceship, these along with the actual model are created by LEGO and its designers. There’s also a page which acts as an element guide, giving you a basic tour of some of the useful pieces you’ll find in your own collection. Along with the book is a box, which not only holds the polybag set, but also doubles as a scene to display your creations.
The Build
For many LEGO fans the biggest draw of the book, which be the inclusion of an exclusive LEGO build, which cannot be found anywhere else. Although not an overly elaborate set, the Green Lantern Corp Spaceship is a decent little build, which uses some cool elements.
But most impressively is it is themed around one of the DC Comics characters who hasn’t really featured at all in the extensive range of LEGO DC Comics Super Heroes playsets. In fact beyond a couple of Comic-Con exclusives, the character has only appeared in minifigure form, in a single LEGO playset back in 2015. So despite the sets minimal size, it will most definitely appeal to fans of DC Comics and collectors of rare sets.
Being the Green Lanterns Spaceship, it is of course rather green, but nicely combines standard green elements with lighter green pieces and a couple of different shades of transparent elements. These are the best parts of the build as they really help to make it look like something the Green Lantern would of created using the power of his ring.
The Minifigure
With the Green Lantern only appearing in a single set, it would of been very easy for DK and LEGO to just include the same minifigure with this new book, however a different version of the character has been chosen instead making this book extremely sought after for Super Heroes minifigure collectors. Past LEGO versions of the Green Lantern have been based on the Hal Jordan version of the character but here, fan favourite John Stewart is portraying the character.
They haven’t just popped a new head and hand on the old minifigure torso either. As you can see below, John’s suit is completely different to Hal’s although it still suffers from the slightly misaligned printing on the legs. The minifigure also has two facial expressions. It’s a great inclusion and really earns the exclusive tag, some of the minifigures included with other LEGO books aren’t particularly exciting but that really isn’t the case here.
Overall
The complete package of the Build Your Own Adventure titles are always impressive, some may consider the lack of instructions for the inspirational builds as a obstacle, but I don’t think a book of instructions is particularly interesting to look at, especially for younger readers. The way these builds are inter-weaved with a story, is quite fun but the biggest USP for the LEGO DC Comics Super Heroes Build Your Own Adventure book is most certainly the LEGO set and even more so, the John Stewert minifigure, which is definitely worth adding to your collection.
LEGO DC Comic Super Heroes Build Your Own Adventure is published by DK Books and will be available from August 3rd. Pre-order now from Amazon. Thanks to DK Books for providing this book for review.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks