In a collaboration that NO ONE thought would ever happen, LEGO has teamed up with Hasbro to create a LEGO Optimus Prime set! I know, I can’t believe it either. The product page up for 10302 Optimus Prime is already up on LEGO.com reveals a release date of June 1, 2022, a price of $169.99, and a piece count of 1,508 pieces.
I haven’t bought a LEGO set for myself in a long time. My most recent purchases have been mostly polybags for the year-long project. Anything else I’ve bought were justified by me thinking I’ll do a review on it. But Optimus Prime invokes a completely different feeling.
I was a big Transformers fan growing up. And a G1 Prime toy was something I was never able to attain. Then a few decades later, I more than made up for it by going buckwild buying tons of Transformers toys, including several iterations of Optimus.
I’ve since liquidated most of my collection, but this LEGO version, this is one I want, nay, NEED to buy.
A couple of quick points:
- I really wish it came with a trailer. Yeah sure it would have increased the cost, but he needs his trailer. Perhaps LEGO will do what Takara did with the Masterpiece line and re-re-release him with a trailer as a “Perfect Edition”.
- The official press release has this interesting bullet point: “Featuring both Robot and alt modes, this is one of the few LEGO sets that converts between two different models”. Maybe it’s the hopeful side of me that’s interpreting that to mean that there will be other LEGO Transformers sets that may not convert without disassembly. I don’t recall LEGO ever making a set that requires partial disassembly to convert something from one more to another. And the 3-in-1 sets and alternate builds don’t count.
- The set is listed under the Creator theme which is strange. Even Stranger Things got it’s own listing back when they only had 75810 The Upside Down. There’s no Creator Expert label anywhere, and instead there’s a huge Transformers logo at the top.
- I love the accessories it comes with, specifically Sideswipe’s jetpack. I vividly remember watching that scene in my youth. One of the hallmark differences between the Autobots and Decepticons was that the Decepticons can fly, and the Autobots couldn’t. When Prime put on the Jetpack I remember my young self thinking, “Wow that’s cool!” followed up with, “Why don’t they just make more jetpacks?”.
- I like that the display plaque recreates the tech specs from the original toy.
Official Pictures of 10302 Optimus Prime
