Today I finished building this:
It’s a 3500 piece model of Castle Grayskull from Masters Of The Universe. It looks like LEGO but it’s actually ‘Mega Construx’, which is a LEGO ripoff competitor. The kit came out for $250 but I got it for quite a bit less on Amazon, both because I love the design and because the reviews were overwhelmingly positive.
The packaging is beautiful and opening the massive (and heavy!) box revealed lovely art and a fantastic manual. The 50+ bags of pieces are separated into four smaller boxes each with their own art, and the entire thing screamed quality.
The kit was built in five parts, each of which took 2-3 hours. It wasn’t a trivial build, but not as challenging as the more complex LEGO technic kits. However the mega construx pieces are slightly lower quality than LEGO and occasionally were difficult to actually push together! As a result it was physically more difficult to make this set than your average LEGO kit 🙂
There’s also the occasional bit of molding flash visible (as you can see above) and the manufacturing of the pieces isn’t as perfect as LEGO, but overall I was extremely impressed with how well the set was designed and went together. I had routinely dismissed LEGO competitors before making this kit, but now I’ll have to keep my eyes open in case anything else of this quality is released.
That’s the front of the finished castle…
And that is the back. Note the curved walls and roof, and the 100+ individual little brown pieces used for roof tiles. It’s a tall kit, very sturdy and heavy. I feel if I dropped it it would hardly break!
Of course it opens and has massive amounts of ‘play features’ including several doors, a jail cell (with creepy inhabitant), a moving throne, a cannon, ladder, moving lift etc. It came with six minifigs (and I bought a few extras myself) which are a good LEGO-scale equivalent of the original guys from the 1980s.
I’ve always loved LEGO castles and for many years have wished for a highly detailed and large kit (perhaps of Neuschwanstein) so when I saw this I bought it as much for it being a castle as the (cool!) MOTU origin.
It was great fun to build and looks wonderful up on my bookshelf. But there’s still a spot free if LEGO is inspired and finally releases a detailed castle of their own…