Today I am reviewing Enlighten (启蒙, Qi Meng) set 1014, Arena. Most AFOLs would call this bootleg, clone brand, etc. I on the other hand would prefer to call this other brick brands.
Like most Army Builders out there, there comes a time where LEGO can no longer satisfy the army building needs in terms of accessories for the troops. Like many, I have turned to Customisers like Brick Warriors, Brick Arms, etc for my needs. But sometimes I do look at other brick brands for alternatives too. To be fair, other brick brands do produce some fairly interesting and highly usable accessories for the army building needs in the recent years. To me I am indifferent if the accessories came from a Customiser or from other brick brands, the accessories from either source are not legit LEGO in the first place.
What attracted me to this set was the jagged spear, the guan dao and the red ribbons attached to the weapons which is quite oriental to me and unique in the sense that LEGO hardly ever produce any oriental weapons before. It is also a great chance for me to accessorise my 蓝家军. So I bought a set to have a look at the quality before committing to a larger purchase.
Review:
Set Number : 1014
Set Name : Arena
Piece Count : 244
Price : RMB13.00
Distribution : China, Worldwide maybe?
The front of the box.
The back of the box.
Contents of the set. 1 instruction paper, 3 unnumbered packs, 1 6×12 Grey Plate and 1 1×16 Black Brick.
Contents of the set all laid out.
A random shot of the instruction paper. I really like the way the instructions for the previous step is grey out.
The complete model. A fairly straight forward set to build.
After thoughts:
Initially I thought there was some flaws on the helmet, as it seems way too high for the Enlighten minifigs.
But the helmet fit perfectly to the LEGO minifig. So I realised that its actually the face printing on the Enlighten head that is too low.
Of course I just have to fit the accessories onto a LEGO minifig.
I spent RMB13.00 (SGD4.00ish) for these accessories, which I think the quality is comparable to LEGO’s and some of the customisers’ accessories. Which in my opinion is quite worth it, its like almost 20 items for SGD4.00ish? Most Customisers’ cheapest weapon is probably priced around USD1.00 (SGD1.30ish) each? I leave it to readers to do the maths and decide for themselves.
Hope you enjoyed this. Thank you for reading.