LEGO has never been the best company at communicating, well… anything really, unless they wanted something from fan and news sites. So while it was surprising that when the 2016 sets showed up at the beginning of the year and half of the new sets were missing, it wasn’t really shocking that LEGO missed telling anyone about it. The weirdest part was that Europe got all of the releases at the same time, but the rest of the world was left waiting for the new sets that had originally been revealed together.
No idea if it has something to do with the “shortage” that LEGO reported in Europe last year, but there have been some real strange trends in the LEGO supply chain lately after years of pretty predictable stuff. Several sets were gone in short windows, and some seem to linger around on shelves. Now that all of the early 2016 sets on on shelves, we have last year’s lingering battle packs along with four new packs. I’ve already covered 75132 First Order Battle Pack and 75131 Resistance Trooper Battle Pack, which are both fine ways to spend your LEGO dollars.
While I love the chance to bolster the number of First Order troops I have (Resistance is a bit more sketchy, as they didn’t do anything) in the movie, I was far more excited to review 75134 Galactic Empire Battle Pack and it’s brother, 75133 Rebel Alliance Battle Pack, since there is no such thing as too many Rebel or Imperial troops. I’ll talk about the Rebel pack on Thursday, but there were some things that were an immediate draw in the Empire pack, like an Imperial Technician and a couple of jetpacks. At 109 parts and the standard Battle Pack cost of $12.99, this set seems to have a whole lot going for it. Except apparently anything to clean armor.