A few weeks ago, the day Shore Leave began, I stopped at Target. I needed to pick up some supplies for the weekend, and while I was there I took a look at the various LEGO and LEGO-like sets that they had.
And, there on the shelf, were the Mega Bloks World of WarCraft sets. Some of them, at any rate.
I picked up one of the low-end sets, the Gnome Flying Machine, but it wasn’t until last night, as I was listening to the Nationals/Mets game on a staticky AM radio station, that I finally put the set together.
Why did I buy it? I’ve never played World of WarCraft, after all. (I did, however, plot out a World of WarCraft novel several years ago, for reasons I don’t recall, and maybe I should think about doing something original with it…) Partly of out curiosity. Partly just for fun. And partly because I was curious to see how these sets compared to the LEGO Lord of the Rings sets or the early-2000s LEGO Castle sets (a period when it went through a WarCraft-esque phase). Mega Bloks World of WarCraft may not represent Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings at all, but the sets would make a nice stand-in for Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer. 😉
For being a 90-piece set, it took a little longer than I’d have expected to build, maybe twenty minutes. The set itself was fairly simple. It wasn’t an intricate as, say, the KRE-O Transformers: Starscream set. But some of the pieces didn’t go together easily (exhaust pipes or the minifig attachment, I’m looking at you), and the style of the instructions themselves required some decoding. But when it was done, it looked pretty nice.
In the last year, I’ve built some LEGO, I’ve built some KRE-O, I’ve built some Character Building, and I’ve built some Mega Bloks. To me, LEGO and Character Building have a very similar feel (and I think that Character Building feels more like older LEGO, to be honest), KRE-O builds right but looks and feels off, and Mega looks right but feels and builds off. (One major problem with Mega is that the minifigs aren’t usable with baseplates; you have have put studs on their feet to affix them.)
I’m unlikely to take the plunge and buy the Stormwind set — yes, it looks fantastic, but it’s expensive and I have no place for it — but a couple more of these smaller sets, or the Goblin Zeppelin, wouldn’t be out of place in my collection.