Saturday, June 14th, 2014 at 6:18pm by Andrew, BZPower News Manager [Source: Makaru]
The Mixels keep coming! Today BZPower Forum Leader Makaru reviews the Flexers, one of the tribes from the second series of LEGO's new line. I hope you like tentacles, because these guys are full to the brim with them! Will they wriggle your money out of your wallet or will they be left dangling? You'll have to read on to find out!
Presentation
From the design of the box to the instruction manual, these are the first things you see before building the set.
MORE MIXELS. The front is standard fair for what we've been seeing up to this point. Our guests of honor do a little pose for the camera on the polybag, and everything is toned to the scheme of the Mixel core colour, this time a vibrant orange.
The back shows you what other amazing Mixels you can buy (wherever Mixels are sold) as well as what terrifying tentacle creature the Flexors form. Downright monstrous. But more on that later.
As per usual, you also get a reminder that, yes, the site totally exists with games to play and you should please go check it out or you'll make Binkmeister cry.
Building
Half the fun is had building the set. How fun is it to build and how easy or challenging is it?
I had more fun piecing the Flexors together than I did the Cragsters. The pieces are more varied, more colourful and there's just a lot more going on, design-wise. Neither of them really stood out as too simple for a set under $5.
KRAW wound up with the short end of the stick, with very basic legs but the body more than made up for it.
TENTRO did get a little tedious when putting the stud "suckers" on its tentacles, but otherwise was a positive experience.
BALK has the most unique design of the Mixels I've seen so far, being tripodal and having a large and doofy-looking head.
Set Design
Now that the set is complete, we can critique how it looks from every angle. New or interesting pieces can also be examined here.
Each Flexor comes with a good array of pieces previously unavailable in orange, or otherwise hard to find. I also enjoy that each Mixel comes with the newer clip joint, which is a relatively difficult piece to get a hold of. There is also the usual Mixel joints that I, as a MOCer, cannot get ENOUGH of.
KRAW unfortunately suffers in that it comes with NO new Mixel joints at all, though the black elephant trunks do somewhat make up for that. The core body is also a nice build with no major flaws that I can consider.
TENTRO looks like a reaper from Mass effect, so let's get all this ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL YOU HAVE THE ATTENTION OF THOSE INFINITELY YOUR GREATER blah de blah de blah. The leg design is simple, but interesting enough. The body/head has a lot going on and gives it an interesting shape.
BALK has this weird tripodal thing going for it and it's a nice departure from normalcy. The minifig hat/eyeball thing looks better in picture than in practice, though. Maybe Lego would have been better off with the shorter brimmed hat? Who knows. The hammerhead design is definitely an interesting look. BALK is also the set that comes with the little Nixel enemy thing, which is not much different than Nixels before.
FLEXOR MAX is interesting to say the very least. It uses a good 60% of the pieces, and has a great, shrimp-like form. It's very articulated. It's a shame that so many other pieces are left unused, but that's nothing new for combiners.
I wonder what it would be like if...
Oh.
OH.
NO THANK YOU. NOPE NOPE NOPE.
Playability
The other half of the fun is in playing with the set. How well does the set function and is it enjoyable to play with?
The Flexors are definitely more expressible than the Cragsters. They can only be posed in a limited number of ways, but for $5 sets it's not too bad. Builders and MOCers alike will definitely have a good time with these.
Final Thoughts
Once it's all said and done, how does the set stack up? Should I get it?
Pros
What's to like?
Great source for orange colors
Design is pretty top
Great piece selection
More Mixel joints
Cons
What's not to like?
Kraw has no Mixel joints at all
Flexor Max doesn't fully utilize all the pieces
That might actually not be so bad
A big thanks goes to Makaru for putting together this review! You can thank him yourself or leave any questions you might have in the Talkback, as always. We've got more reviews incoming, so keep checking back for them, along with the latest LEGO news, right here on BZPower!