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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!
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MultiQuote
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! 
And those intake pieces are only relatively new btw, they are in almost all of the current $10 Racers sets. 
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. 
