Agents Mission 5: Turbo Car Chase - set #8634, Photoshoot & Review Options

[Deinonychus]

Coming in at around $50 US, Turbo Car Chase is one of the bigger of the new Agents sets. A big box with a helicopter, car, and gate in it. Seems like a winner, but how good is it really, and is it worth the cash?



Let's start with the Minifigs. This set comes with a standard Inferno Henchman, Spy Clops, and Agent Chase. The Henchman is you basic LEGO criminal type with a gun and a jumpsuit, nothing real groundbreaking here. Spy Clops, on the other hand, is very cool for, technically, half of a Minifig. His head has a neat electronic goggle print and the rest of him is a torso mounted onto a set of six legs made from Exo-Force robot arms. The whole thing is really well done and neat as hell. Agent Chase (Turbo Car Chase! ) seems to have a standard agent body and a double-printed face with one side a sunglasses and headset print.



The other face is a determined Agent look. The set also includes a laptop with Doctor Inferno wallpaper. The laptop is a new piece and works like the LEGO books that are in a lot of Harry Potter sets.



Molding on the keyboard is really well done and the thing can be held by a Minifig along either corner, but not in the middle and not while closed.



The gate in the set is nothing revolutionary by itself, and I sort of get the feeling that it was included to drive up the piece count and the set price point. That being said, there are some things to like here. For instance, the gate has four wheels of barbed wire attached to it. The barbed wire is new and makes me want to start building some World War I trench MOCs. The rest of the gate is fairly big and it has a handy ramp attached so that vehicles can roll through it easily.



The main feature of the gate is a sound brick. It's much better then LEGO sound and light units of the past, when the gate is opened it depresses a button and an alert klaxon blares that sounds every bit like a prison-beak in progress. The triggering action works surprisingly well and it's pretty much for this feature alone that I'm not going to immediately break the gate back down and add it to my parts bin.



The designers did make an effort to create more then just a fence though. A nice control panel connected to a big spotlight crowns the piece, and a pair of cameras watch the opening.



It's really hard to mess up a LEGO helicopter, and this set is no exception. The Inferno Chopper is a nicely proportioned and well built machine. It looks properly menacing and has the uniform orange and black of other Inferno property.



It's armed with a set of four Technic pegs cleverly used as guns on outriding mounts, as well as a pair of the newer-style flick-fire missiles. I personally don't care for flick-firing missiles, but these look decent enough and seem to stay put so I really can't complain about them.



Along the fuselage are a pair of intake pieces that I've never seen before and I'm guessing are new. They're pretty well designed and will come in handy for MOCing down the road.



The action feature of the aircraft is the wench system. This is very different then other LEGO wenches in that you build the entire mechanism and housing. You can then use it to raise Spy Clops up and down from the bottom of the chopper using the rotor. Now, this also keeps you from sitting there and just giving the rotor repeated spins to simulate flight. I'm not too thrilled with that, but there are a hundred other LEGO helicopters out there with fully rotating rotors, so I guess I can let it by just this once.

As you'd suspect, the bottom of the cockpit is completely open, which makes this a vehicle pretty much solely for Spy Clops (Sorry Henchman). But there is plenty of room beneath the body to attach a plate with some seats on it to accommodate another pilot without drastically altering the design, or even removing existing pieces.



The Turbo Car is a slick little honey of a LEGO car, and the silver pieces that make up the body work contribute a lot to that fact.



The front license plate appears to be an Exo-Fore code brick. But it also hides the activation lever for the passenger ejector seat. The seat works about as well
as the Spruce Goose, which is to say not well at all, but here it's the thought that counts.



The interior of the car is really well done. There's even a radar screen for keeping track of pesky helicopters.



But the Bond-like features don't end there. A lever in the compartment raises pair of guns in the hood and a knob on the rear deploys a quad rocket system with more flick-fire missiles. This is a car that won't be stopped easily!



The rear has two cones sticking out. I'd like to think they're smoke nozzles or oil-slick sprayers.

All-in-all, this is a really good set.

The car is pure LEGO vehicle love and looks fantastic. The silver pieces are very nice and it's a shame LEGO doesn't use metallic colors in System sets more often. There are, however, a LOT of sticker for this set and I know how much that bugs a lot of people. I personally like how much detail the stickers add to these sets and don't mind them so much.

The set also comes with an Agents ID card for Chase which you can put little star stickers on from other sets as you get them. It's printed on a real nice piece of sturdy plastiboard and would be cooler if you could put your own picture and name on it instead of pretending to be Chase.

Sold by themselves, the car and chopper would be must-haves. All tossed together with the gate sort of makes the set a little less then the sum of it's parts. And with 498 parts (most of them small) that's not so hot. It's only slightly over-priced in my opinion, but if you do shell out the money you won't regret it. I'm very comfortable recommending this set to anyone.

Close to perfect, but the price and some minor flaws bring it back just a little. I'd say 4.33, but out of 5 is close enough!

[The Joker]

Looks cool, one of the best in this line. Cant wait for review!

[Grevious]

Chrome.....

Can't wait for the review, Deino!

[mammymarf]

can't wait for the review the car is ly!!!

[The Brick Rat]

Pics and thoughts tomorrow!

I picked up this set earlier in the week and was quite pleased with it (in fact I have missions 1-5 and am happy with all of them - this series is much better than the old Alpha Team ever was). I look forward to reading your thoughts on it. I will say 2 things about it now though.

1)My set came with defective instructions. In 2 places pages are missing and duplicates of other pages repeated. For instance, the car instructions are missing steps 16-21. Fortunately, I was able to make out what pieces went where in the missing steps by studying the illustration in step 22. I hope you have better luck with your instructions.

2)This set contains the best LEGO sound brick ever (it's just begging to be incorporated into my Arkham Asylum).

[Mr. Mandalorian]

Yay! Can't wait for your review. I plan to get this and the giant truck.

2)This set contains the best LEGO sound brick ever (it's just begging to be incorporated into my Arkham Asylum).

What is a sound brick?

[cyclone501]

What is a sound brick?

Ditto. Maybe its like the Exo-Force light-up brick, only with sound instead of light. That would kick [INNAPROPRIATE WORD DELETED].

[Deinonychus]

1)My set came with defective instructions. In 2 places pages are missing and duplicates of other pages repeated. For instance, the car instructions are missing steps 16-21. Fortunately, I was able to make out what pieces went where in the missing steps by studying the illustration in step 22. I hope you have better luck with your instructions.

Everything was just fine with my directions. Sounds like you just ran into some bad luck there, my friend.

2)This set contains the best LEGO sound brick ever (it's just begging to be incorporated into my Arkham Asylum).

I agree 100%. And I didn't even see it had a sound brick until I read this last night. Usually LEGO promotes stuff like that pretty loudly on the packaging. Not here though.

[Oky Wan Kenobi]

WOW! Thanks, Deino, for this great review! I can't wait to get this myself, but right now I gotta save for the CW sets! The car is with no doubt one of the most mind blowing things TLG has come up with and we can only hope that there will be more models made out of almost only metalic colors! The spider cyborg, while not as innovative as some of the other cyborgs, is a very nice fig, and his head will be very usefull for Splinter Cell MOCs! And those intake pieces are only relatively new btw, they are in almost all of the current $10 Racers sets.

Any chance of you taking a pic of a line-up of all the silver parts in this set?

This post has been edited by Oky Wan Kenobi: May 24 2008, 11:32 PM

[Grevious]

Great review, Deino!

Man, that car is just so beautiful, and the helicopter is nice too. Unfortunately, this seems pretty pricy, and I hardly think I'll be getting it any time soon, what with my limited budget and all.

Still, it's great to see how well Agents is shaping up.

[Zechariah Legio]

I love it ! Fun, playable, cool looking, and killer minifigs! Sweet!

[Batbrick]

Thanks for the review Deino! I love going back through the old "Agents" thread just to see how wrong we were about these awesome sets!
I actually really like the gate, those portcullis pieces people may know i always find nice uses for, and I really, really, really want that awesome sound brick. The figs are a bit disappointing in numbers, but agent Chase is very cool, generic henchman are great, and Spy Clops is one of my favourite minifigs ever!
The helicopter is wonderful too, I love that it is customised for Spy clops to winch him down. The colours as usual for these sets are fantastic, the dark blue, orange and chrome silver!
The car is the best though, I love all the functions. How does the ejector seat work though?

Batbrick away!

[TinyPiesRUs]

Wow, thanks for the great review Deino

This set is really a must have for me. The sound brick seems great, the helicopter looks very nice and the car is superb! All of the James Bond features are really cool, though I'm very interested in how the ejector seat works (or doesn't work..). The car itself is very sleek and full of beautiful silver, and the inclusion of the new rims and windshield mean that I won't have to buy many Speed Racer sets. As for the minifigs, they all look great, especially SpyClops. Though it looks rather easy for him to fall off of his spider legs. Can you confirm this?

A great review of a great set, thanks Deinonychus

[iamded]

Thanks for the awesome review, Deinonychus! This really is a sweet set, a bit expensive a set for me, as I only get the cheaper non-Castle sets, which is a shame because I love that head! It would be great for some more cyborg troops. The car is awesome, I didn't expect it to have that many silver parts, that's fantastic! Heaps of play features too, that ejector seat mechanism sounds interesting. Thanks again for the sweet review!
~Peace

[Zechariah Legio]

The rear has two cones sticking out. I'd like to think they're smoke nozzles or oil-slick sprayers.

According to page 14 of my BrickMaster magazine, the left cone is for smoke screen and the right cone is for oil slick.