LEGO Star Wars 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder review

02/08/202403/08/2024 Chris Wharfe 481 Views 0 Comments

LEGO Star Wars dials up the fun and creativity for a set that channels every facet of the Disney parks experience – including the expense.

75392 Creative Play Droid Builder is not a LEGO set designed for Serious AFOLs. (That’s adult fans of LEGO, if you’re not familiar with the parlance.) It is instead a set designed for anyone ready to embrace their whimsical era. These miniature astromech droids and their overflowing fancy dress box are her to jazz up your LEGO Star Wars collection – but only if you’re willing to pay the price. And what a price it is.

Release: August 1, 2024 Price: £89.99 / $99.99 / €99.99 Pieces: 1,186 Minifigures: 1 LEGO: Order now

Hats and ‘staches and glasses, oh my

The LEGO Group is tapping into the potential of building together across a bunch of different themes at the moment, so it was only a matter of time before it leaned into the concept with LEGO Star Wars. 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder (as its name suggests with all the subtlety of a hammer to the face) revolves around mixing and matching buildable droids in whatever creative way comes to mind.

Want to pop R2-D2’s head on QT-KT’s body with R5-J2’s legs, then give them a bow tie, hard hat and rubber duck ring? You can do that. Want to give Chopper a fedora and pretend the spirit of Dave Filoni has somehow been imprisoned inside your LEGO collection? The instructions and box art actively encourage it. This is a LEGO set designed around building, breaking apart and having fun with a bunch of Star Wars droids. Anyone looking to steadfastly recreate canon should probably stay away.

This is no bad thing. There’s definitely room for a set like this in what’s still first and foremost a product line of toys for kids, no matter how steadily the scales are currently tipping in the direction of black-boxed 18+ sets. And it taps into a similar experience at Disney’s theme parks in which guests can build their own droid to take home, only with a little LEGO magic dust sprinkled on top.

LEGO Star Wars gets silly

The beauty of 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder is that it’s got that LEGO DNA coursing through its veins, from the ability to snap apart and reconfigure the droids with relative ease (only the bits you want to come off tend to, while the rest stays intact, demonstrating intelligent use of stronger and weaker connections where necessary) to their proportions that mimic LEGO astromech droids rather than their on-screen source material.

Those bulky shoulders are intentional and brilliant and just another sign that this is a set not intended for Serious AFOLs to pop on a shelf to gather dust. No shade to Serious AFOLs, by the way. But consider this: 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder might just be the set to remind you that LEGO Star Wars can be fun, too. It’s not all pointy grey triangles and critiquing the colour of Boba Fett’s gloves.

Or it might not be for you at all, and that’s also fine. But for what it’s trying to do, this 1,186-piece pack of mix-and-match droids really is fun for all the family. It just happens to be for families who might have recently come into some vast inheritance or won at least five numbers on the lottery or perhaps just rediscovered a long-dormant savings account mysteriously marked ‘future LEGO fund’.

The true Disney parks experience

75392 Creative Play Droid Builder costs £89.99 / $99.99 / €99.99, and does very, very little to justify that price tag. There’s fun to be had here, particularly as a shared experience, but it is not £90 of fun. It is not £90 of LEGO. Look at these droids and ask yourself if you’d pay £22.50 for one. You wouldn’t. They’re small. They’re quirky. They’re a novelty. And they definitely shouldn’t have been priced the same way as regular LEGO Star Wars sets.

If you want to get families involved and have parents share that building experience with their kids and maybe foster in them a lifelong love of LEGO, surely making it accessible is step one. This set doesn’t do that, and what could have been a novelty and quirky aside for LEGO Star Wars collectors and an afternoon activity for families suddenly becomes a tall order indeed. The Princess Leia 25th anniversary minifigure doesn’t really help much either, largely because it doesn’t feel like it should be here at all.

The target audience for 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder is not the same as the target audience for the LEGO Star Wars 25th anniversary minifigures, and especially not those out to collect them all. These are relatively obscure characters from the wider Star Wars universe included as bonus minifigures in 2024 sets, and so far they’ve come packaged with classic LEGO Star Wars icons like the Sith Infiltrator and (the larger, displayable) R2-D2 and the Star Destroyer. Including Princess Leia from the Obi-Wan Kenobi series in this set feels like a wholly cynical way to drive purchases from a slice of the market who would normally just accept that it’s not for them and pick up something else instead.

The good news is that if you’re not hellbent on collecting every single one of the 25th anniversary characters, this is probably the easiest one to skip. Leia is alright as a minifigure, even if her Lola companion droid is woefully oversized – who thought a 2×2 boat tile would be more appropriate than a 1×1 element? – but she’s probably not strong enough to be a set seller all her own, particularly with one eye on the wider response to the Kenobi show.

75392 Creative Play Droid Builder didn’t really need a bonus minifigure to sell its concept, though: it just needed a cheaper price tag. There’s a genuinely fun and charming LEGO Star Wars set to be had here, if only it wasn’t locked behind a paywall that will cause most people to shrug and move on.

This set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.

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Our honest opinion: Wait for the inevitable discount and you might just find that this awakens a new type of LEGO Star Wars collector within you. We should all be grateful to embrace our whimsical era.

How long does it take to build LEGO Star Wars 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder?

You’ll spend around 20 to 30 minutes putting together each of the four droids in LEGO Star Wars 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder. Share the build between friends or family and you can have it all done and ready to mix and match in half an hour.

How many pieces are in LEGO Star Wars 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder?

75392 Creative Play Droid Builder includes 1,186 pieces, with which you’ll assemble four different astromech droids, an entire wardrobe of accessories and a LEGO Star Wars 25th anniversary minifigure with display stand.

How big is LEGO Star Wars 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder?

R2-D2, QT-KT and R2-J5 each stand 11.5cm tall, 10cm wide and 6.5cm deep without accessories, while the more diminutive Chopper measures 10.5cm tall. Expect to add a few centimetres to each of those dimensions depending on which accessories you equip to LEGO Star Wars 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder’s droids.

How much does LEGO Star Wars 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder cost?

LEGO Star Wars 75392 Creative Play Droid Builder is available now and retails for £89.99 in the UK, $99.99 in the US and €99.99 in Europe.

Author Profile

Chris Wharfe

I like to think of myself as a journalist first, LEGO fan second, but we all know that’s not really the case. Journalism does run through my veins, though, like some kind of weird literary blood – the sort that will no doubt one day lead to a stress-induced heart malfunction. It’s like smoking, only worse. Thankfully, I get to write about LEGO until then.