If ever there was a LEGO Star Wars set that illustrated just how difficult it is to truly gauge the theme’s pricing structure, it must be 75342 Republic Fighter Tank. Dual-moulded white and purple legs would have improved these characters massively (even if at a cost) – as is, their toe printing looks a bit naff, like they’re wearing little tap-dancing shoes. Mainly because the star attraction is obviously the Clone Troopers, and they go a long way to filling out the Republic’s rainbow army – Star Wars is inherently silly, remember – with detailed printing from head to (literal) toes.Įxcept for the mid-section of their boots, of course, which would cover that bit of minifigure legs that can seemingly never be printed on.
What we actually need more of is Super Battle Droids (they haven’t been in a LEGO set since 2015!), but we’ll take these for the easy, throwaway addition that they are.
Here’s another Mace Windu – a character we’ve already documented the LEGO Group’s weird relationship with – only with printed arms (so, better than the one in that £320 UCS set you bought last year, bizarrely) three Clone Troopers seemingly based on a Hasbro action figure pack from 2007 (er, what?) and – somewhat less randomly – two Battle Droids, because we always need more of those. It’s a niche category, for sure, but one that 75342 Republic Fighter Tank is likely to top.
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The build’s over almost as quickly as you start, but for a vehicle that we were shocked to see get even a second set in 2017, it still feels fresh the third time around.īy the time December 2022 rolls around, and we’re thinking about how to celebrate the year just gone (in LEGO), remind us to put together a list on ‘the most random and unexpected minifigure line-ups’. They’ll never see it coming.ĭeploying the tank’s crew isn’t a terribly straightforward sequence then, but the wheels carefully and subtly built into its base – they could easily have been eyesores – allow the tank to ‘hover’ across any surface you choose, and between its copious slopes and slightly-less-copious stickers it absolutely looks the part. The set otherwise does a pretty good job of capturing the general shape of its source material, even if it does take a mostly toyetic approach to it: while one of the three Clone Troopers can sit in the main hatch, another hides strangely behind the nose, and the third (whichever one draws the short straw, presumably) just gets to lie down in the back, ready to worm his way out into battle. Less detailed are the blank white slopes, a point of contention in initial reactions to 75342 Republic Fighter Tank among the community, but in practice they’re mostly hidden by the rotating side cannons anyway. And it takes a novel (if slightly simplistic) approach to achieving that size, sealing – although not entirely, for there is a frustrating gap – a pair of huge slope pieces with a reversed, opaque and stickered X-wing fighter cockpit, which is a surprisingly good fit for the tank’s weirdly-shaped ‘nose’ section.Īligning the decals along it also isn’t quite as tricky as you might imagine (their white background helps), and they do a lot of heavy lifting in communicating detail not afforded by the single-piece solution. That means it’s taller and beefier than the 2017 version, 75182 Republic Fighter Tank, though not quite as overwhelmingly massive as 2008’s 7679 Republic Fighter Tank (to some relief).
You know, just in case this source material wasn’t niche enough for you. And by and large, that makes it not too big, not too small, but basically just right – at least as an adaptation of the TX-130 as seen in EA’s original Battlefront games from the early ‘00s, rather than the more modern version from the late ‘10s. The LEGO Group’s third take on a vehicle we’ve only ever seen in video games – we’re as surprised as you – also represents its third different scale, sitting somewhere in the middle of the last two. Set theme: LEGO Star Wars Set name: 75342 Republic Fighter Tank Release: April 26, 2022
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