Clone OPatra

We need an Otto Gunga throne room with Boss Nass and Anakin's house with Shmi and naked 3PO before a throne on a lazily/hurriedly designed barren rock planet with Adam Driver in a plain long sleeve black shirt from Gap. In my humble opinion, that is. But yes there are truly so many Star Wars locations that we've never gotten, especially from the Prequels.

The number of available parts increased by 12 yesterday, but I can't tell what they've added. Whatever it is, it's not classified as newer than the previous recent wave of added parts, since nothing new shows up at the top when sorting for newest.

Precisely. This is why. I enjoy setting up displays with official sets, and the 2018-2020 sets are great to display. The newer ones are not. The design team has managed to mash the new sets together into a shape that if you squint, it kind of approximates the "official Hogwarts layout" by the end of the film series. But open your eyes fully and it's ugly, unseemly, full of gaps, a mishmash of colours and design elements. The 2018-2020 sets are elegant by comparison, and I'm not saying that off the top of my head. I'm looking at my display of them as I type.

What do you mean by "looks"? Because sure it's cute that they managed to shoehorn these boxy sets together to approximate the shape/layout of the castle from the films, but in terms of actual visual design the 2018-2020 sets still look leagues better to me. This new system, even when all combined is still a stylistic jumble, and has tons of very unpleasing things to the eye like big open arches and bland wall panels, blocky details, messy colours. For kids I'm sure it's a lot of fun, and like I said it's neat that they managed a Hogwarts shape out of it in the end, but I wouldn't want this system on display. The older sets still have way more charm to their designs.

No.

I love the comparatively massive slope parts as thumbs. Mechs in other themes have been having clip parts as thumbs for at least a decade. Why slopes here? Do the Star Wars designers just not know how to do mechs?

You're looking at it the wrong way. LEGO has just hiked the price "because price hikes". They absolutely could give us the same amount of pieces for less money, not shave off pieces in order to charge less.

Wow they really went and put such a fantastic Boba in a mech set. Kudos. But wow these kind of suck otherwise. They almost look like something someone made at home. The colours and random pieces used for detail are all over the place. The only interesting thing is how chunky they made Boba's and Stormie's, but for the price, messy designs and complete lack of connection with the actual Star Wars universe, these are bad. Of all of the small gimmick types of things - minis, planet sets with minis, microfighters - these have the least connection with Star Wars by far. They might be fun for kids to play with, but they had to be baseline $10 - not $16!!

He's done a story rant on Instagram but we'd love the expanded version here.

Yeah, it could've had a fun and eye-catching scene even with this Penguin invading the Batcave with penguin henchmen, but instead it's like "here's a pretty generic Batcave on a wall, and um ok you can have some characters from Returns too, here ya go".

My goodness. They can't even budget premium Minifigures for their premium "definitely going to go on sale" set. Catwoman looks so unfinished with the unprinted ear piece and unprinted legs. She's like half Catwoman. The new cowl looks like a ridiculous bobble head next to the '89/'92 one. Just look how huge that is. And I'm still not seeing it be contrasty enough for the shadow box effect to work all that well, but once there are reviews with photographs in slightly less controlled settings, we'll see.

PaB has a been a bit funny with things showing up with this latest release of parts. I previously noted that some things are available but don't appear just scrolling through the full list of parts, so it doesn't surprise me that some available things don't show up when searching inventories either. They've clearly got some bugs to work through.

Yes it's available right now. 6429710

You shouldn't have been expecting that when the rumours said it was going to be a box! But to be honest from the rumours I was imagining something that ONLY looked like the bat symbol when closed up, but then has the big reveal of being a Batcave inside. As it is, this is the bat symbol but you can already see the cave inside, so I can't imagine the reveal is all that exciting, because it's all kind of there already. Perplexing indeed.

No. The death eater included in the set is Scabior, the snatcher who has more scenes in the woods camping sequences. The Year 7 DaD professor is Carrow.

From left to right it looks like: changes what's on the computer (between Penguin and Catwoman at least), swivels chair, opens and closes a vertical roller shutter revealing a Batsuit, opens and closes horizontal doors revealing the arsenal, opens and closes a vertical garage door shutter behind the Batmobile.

Because your plausible deniability gets much harder the more fake details you share Yeah this set kind of sucks but that's just my personal opinion. Another super ill-conceived gimmick that makes no sense for the product.

The 80111 parts not showing up yet could be due to the fact that the set didn't officially launch in North America until 10 January 2023, not 1 January. I highly doubt we won't see ANY of the exclusive parts in that set show up eventually. Even if we don't get something like the big heads, stuff like the cloud plates in cool yellow should be sold.

Looks like it's all up on the US site now!

It's the alternate timeline where he killed Luke and used Luke's skin to make comfy boots.

It really does pack a lot in (plus I got in on sale here in Aus, which helps). Now I'm tempted to make a new version of the original set's cooking competition alt model which I showed in my original review:

For all of the ho humness about the June wave, I just finally bought and built the Black Lake set and I love it! Fantastic display piece, so many good parts, nicely done Minifigures with good new prints (though I wish they'd given Hermione something new and different for her awake face). You can really feel the love put into that set. Yeah it's not perfect and could certainly be expanded, but it's great for what it is.

Looking at pictures of the wave some more, it's incredible how much better the new hood pieces look with some printing. I don't like the plain versions much at all, but the printed ones in the Spinjitzu sets look pretty cool.

Blacktron torso is back OOS - 6429710 Monkie Kid weapon pack is in stock - 2665 (I should've waited to place my order - oh well, next time) Still none of the cool Lunar New Year stuff though. @Megbricks where are you to share in the new parts fun? Or are they not showing up in Canada yet either.

Personally I'd never buy a standard colour scheme LAAT, but a dark red one with swanky clones has me seriously interested. If it's true, that is. The only way it could change is if the source saw super early prelims that were changed later. Promobricks got details of the Harry Potter sets wrong for instance, which were probably things in the prelims they saw. Though not as drastic as changing the whole colour scheme of a set.