Droid commander

Final post of the day... lots to catch up on, it seems.  Next off the shelf is the Droid Commander set from 2019.  I eagerly purchased this straight off as the concept looked really interesting and I was keen to see how it actually worked out in practice.

What you get is enough bricks to build three droids: a really nicely detailed R2-D2, a pretty good Teal gonk droid and an afterthought of an imperial mouse droid.  Plus a number of random parts to build into targets and implements.  And a single control unit that you have to swap between droids.

No instructions, though: they come with the app.  Which is where I started to get a bit bogged down.  I'm generally a pretty fast builder and the app wanted me to do one piece at a time before I could move to the next.  I spent the whole time pressing the "next" button which was pretty frustrating.

You can also only build the R2 unit first and have to leave the rest of the parts bagged up until you've passed enough tests that you can go onto the next bit of build.  Not the end of the world but all a bit linear for my liking. 

On to the tests: the app allows you to build chains of commands that then control your droids into doing a range of activities such as moving forwards until they get to a wall, searching for coloured targets (I never managed to get this to work well) and doing things like beep and dance.  If I was 10, I think I would have found this really fun and super clever.  I'm not 10, though... good for the ability to afford expensive Lego but bad for the sense of wonder.  

I did the basics with each of the three droids but then got bored and put R2 on the shelf and went back to building more sets.  Overall score: 7 out of 10, mainly because the R2 unit is really good for its size.  some photos:

Incidentally, when I got this set back in 2019, I wasn't aware of its precursor, the 1999 Droid Developer Kit (9748).  This gives you an R2-D2 unit with a controller and instructions on various other things you can build too.  In many ways, it's the 2019 set, twenty years earlier and without the tablet integration (there was no such thing back then!).  But it is clearly an inspiration...