Weekly Set Review: Battle at the Pass

Discussion of official LEGO Castle Theme sets and products
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MarioDAlessio
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Re: Weekly Set Review: Battle at the Pass

Post by MarioDAlessio »

Purchased two.
Laird Cashman wrote:This set was pure genius on the part of the designers, reason being that the gate was a brilliant asset; however, this set had no dimension, depth, or width of wall.
Before the release of this set I purchased the larger gates from bricklink. The low brick count limits these sets and something has to give, Im glad it wasn't the minifigure count. Compare for example against tower raid 7037 that has plenty of depth and is basically two individual three dimensional units.

http://shop.lego.com/ByTheme/Product.as ... n=473&d=70
Tycho McKorley wrote:I think it was definitely one of the strongest sets of the KKII line. That said, the design of the wall itself was a little weak, but it always seemed to me it was supposed to supplement some larger castle that never got released.
I always thought this would be a good set for a young builder to be able to purchase and put together with Royal Kings castle.

http://www.classic-castle.com/sets/archives/10176.html

I think this set with 8821 Rogue Knight Battleship are the pick of KK2 match them with the viking chess set and Royal kings castle and what a complete castle range for 2006.

Mario
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vinchenso
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Re: Weekly Set Review: Battle at the Pass

Post by vinchenso »

Hi I'm new to Classic Castle, neways back to topic... :) This set is pure awesomeness. :shock: You get so many weapons as extras for diversity and you have an awesome amount of minifigs fully armed and you have some decent seige weapons which are easily customizable to make some personal bests with (you could probally make way better seige engines, but the parts are useful). The wall really looks awesome and easily changable for swinging walls so that it can fit any nieche in a collection and could make some truly cool castles when more are bought or incorparted with other sets. It looks fine by itself too if you don't like customising. Plus a lot of parts are slightly harder to get without individually ordering pieces. also some colours of assessories available are quite good for those poor at self making parts. Finally this is a good template for any DIY set makers. I loved this knights kingdom series, but they stopped making them in Australia way too quickly... :cry:
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Robin Hood
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Post by Robin Hood »

Hmm, a new one.

Well over all it's a fairly passable set. Certainally the kids should enjoy such a set. Lots of playablity, great pieces, and if I recall, a decent price.

Parts.
Very good selection. The ten dudes, complete with armour and a large assortment of weapons don't leave you wanting. If you are at all into the prefab wall pieces, then you're in good company with this set.

Design.
Horrid. Thats about the best word I can use to describe it. The (cough, cough) siege weapons are just atrocious. The "seige tower" is nothing more than a set of stairs on wheels. Literally! The catapult is, I think it is safe to say, one of the worst ones Lego made. Okay, maybe not, they pretty much all suck, so we will just add this to a long line of sucky catapults. The battering ram looks like the designer took five minutes to build something and called it off there. The idea of using the big knight shoulder armour piece as the front of the ram has merit, but they failed to capitalize on the idea. And then the cart with all the weapons on it just is plain weird. They might as well have gone with the old tradition sucky weapons rack as anything else. The wall isn't too great either. The basic design isn't too bad, ignoring the prefab pieces, but the falling maces behind the door are just stupid.

Playability.
As horrid as the design is, I think it's playability makes up somewhat for it. To a kid's eye, this is a fun cool set. The kid has 10, count em, 10 figs to play with. An equal number of good guys and bad guys to make for a nice long battle. Not to mention several ways to attack the nicely high wall. I am sure that this would rank as a great set for any but the strangest child.

So all in all, this set definately lacks any sort of design that an AFOL would like, but it reaches it's target audience well enough, with the nice fig assortment a good middle ground.

Dan :wink:
I build, therefore I am.

Brave words coming from a guy called grapenuts.
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Papy.G
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Re: Weekly Set Review: Battle at the Pass

Post by Papy.G »

I saw it still in a store in clearance but didn't mind because it was KKII, (as I also saw the castle of morcia 50% off because of damaged box) and when I saw this review, I went to the said store and see it was definitively closed since the morning. :cry:
It seems that it is a great parts source, building wise, and minifig wise.
It would have made for a nice opposing force in my Fantasy-line to come, from wich skellies would have been able to rest in peace.
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printer6
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Post by printer6 »

It is certainly one of the better sets in KK2, but that isn't really saying much. I'm sure KK2 has its fans, but it was a dark age of Lego castle for me. This set at least has more toned down, uniform colors for the knights (not to mention plenty of them) and the sheer number of weapons is definitely nice (although I still don't like the KK style of swords, so it's kind of a non-factor for me). The building design (the wall and the seige engines), however, is horrid. The big, pre-fab wall sections are terrible (I generally don't mind wall panels, but these are pretty excessive) and while it might've been neat for play-factor, the spike balls resting above the doors just looked bad. There was a time where I wanted to get it, but kept passing it up for a variety of reasons; looking back, I'm glad I never got around to buying it.
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Re:

Post by smegged »

I liked this set, but the thing that spoiled it for me was that it had only just been released and then we all got to see the pics of the new fantasy era castle line and that pretty much ruined the goodness of this set (because the new line was so much better). I think a 7/10 is quite a good number for this set.
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Sir Prog
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Re: Weekly Set Review: Battle at the Pass

Post by Sir Prog »

Really wish I would have picked this up back in the day...passed up several affordable opportunities too do so. :(
For the King's Castle!
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