LEGO Marvel X-Men vs The Sentinel KO

Presenting a Knock-off (KO) version of Marvel's X-Men vs The Sentinel LEGO Playset.



In a nutshell, this LEGO Playset features the X-Men: Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm and Magneto flying a Blackbird up against a medium-sized Sentinel. Here's the thing though: We're not sure when this particular scenario would have happened. Magneto - and the way he's dressed - was back when he Headmaster of Xaver's School for Gifted Youngsters (Circa: Fall of the Mutants). The X-Men's Blackbird didn't become a forward-swept-wing aircraft til the X-Men returned to from the Shi-Ar empire along with Charles Xavier and Xavier had Forge redesign the Blackbird.

So this could never have happened.


Also we're not familiar with this particular Blackbird design. It looks like one of the more modern Blackbirds.

Anyway, this is the Famous Heroes Assemble playset. The pirates did not even bother associating it with the X-Men but they did copy the artwork from the original LEGO playset.

The playset includes the aforementioned X-Men's Blackbird, a Medium sized Sentinel, and the Lego versions of Magneto, Cyclops, Storm and Wolverine - all dressed in uniforms from waaay back when Magneto was Headmaster and prior to the time when Storm lost her powers.

The X-Men are in uniforms probably older than some of the people who are now reading this blog - and roughly around the time when we started reading comic books.

From the artwork it looks like the X-Men are also fighting Magneto, but we prefer to keep him as a member of the X-Men since that was the uniform he used when he was an X-Man.

The package also mentions a "comic adventure" included, but nope. There was no comic book inside the package.

WHAT'S TO LIKE ABOUT THE LEGO MARVEL X-MEN VS THE SENTINELS KO PLAYSET.

FIRST: Well it's LEGO - well a KO of LEGO - and it's always fun to let your mind go blank and plod through a building task. It's almost meditative and definitely fun. Albeit this particular playset is nowhere near as complex or sturdy as the KO LEGO Batmobile/Tumbler nor the LEGO Ghost.



SECOND: The LEGO Marvel X-Men vs The Sentinel KO Playset is a lot of fun! As mentioned the playset comes with the X-Men Cyclops, Storm, Magneto and Wolverine:

Storm comes with her own lightning. You can replace Wolverine's mask with a full head of hair and you can add or remove his claws. You can replace Magneto's helmet with hair that makes him look like an angry Beethoven. Keep the helmet on. Magneto also comes with a "Flying platform" which is strange because he can fly on his own power:

The X-Men's Blackbird displays some of the upgrades that Forge installed into it. It's armed. The original X-Men Blackbird was not. This particular LEGO Blackbird has a spring loaded missile launcher that folds onto the rear fuselage and a pair of push missiles on the port and starboard sides:

Note the now exposed missile launcher. Note that you can also re-position the secondary wings.



The LEGO X-Men's Blackbird has a forward opening cockpit that fits two, and another opening at the center that fits two more LEGO figures and exposes what should be CEREBRO - which in this case is warning the passengers of an incoming Sentinel:

You can actually pull out that rectangular container with the warning sign. It contains tools.

The Sentinel is the only fully articulated figure in the Playset. It has balljoints for elbows, shoulders, knees and hips. It even has three movable fingers on each hand. Sadly, it's head does not turn.

It comes armed with a pair of push missiles that can be raised or lowered from it's back and you can attach two "beam" attacks to each hand.

The Sentinel can also hold on to the X-Men:

THIRD:  The price! This LEGO Marvel X-Men vs The sentinel KO Playset was purchased from the black market of St. Francis Square here in Ortigas, Philippines for PhP 780 (Roughly  US$ 17.33). If we had bothered to go too the more seedy black-market spots within the metro, we're pretty sure we could have gotten it for a little less.

An original LEGO Marvel X-Men vs The Sentinel set on Amazon would put you back around US$ 44.42 (Roughly PhP 1,998.90 plus shipping). It's valued at around twice that in local retail stores - we don't really understand why LEGO is so expensive in the Philippines. We would not pay PhP 4,000 (Roughly US$ 88.88) for an original playset.

WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE ABOUT THE LEGO MARVEL X-MEN VS THE SENTINELS KO PLAYSET.

FIRST: While building this particular playset we started noticing that there was an oily film building up on our fingers. It was coming from the KO LEGO pieces.

So we would not recommend that you give this to a child. Nor would we recommend that you give this to adults who like to lick their fingers or eat while they work.

It's probably just a little lead poisoning.

SECOND: The Blackbird does not have any landing gear.

Other than that, nothing. We had fun building and playing with this LEGO Marvell X-Men vs The Sentinel KO Playset and we're hoping there is more from where it came from - til our local LEGO distributor realizes that he's overcharging..