I’m not sure the the Ninjago series gets as much love as it should for sets other than the absolutely epic City series (City, City Docks and City Gardens). They generally have a great set of minifigs that come with them and a tonne of swooshability. We recently bought the Monkey King Warrior Mech and it was an amazing build. Tonnes of colour and it looks fantastic as a display piece.
This started our love affair for LEGO mechs so we had to grab Zane’s Titan Mech once we saw it.
The set includes 4 great minifigs, 3 of which are ready to play and 1 limited edition 10 year anniversary Zane minifig. This was a great choice as it allows you to pilot the mech with one Zane minifig while you display the other.
Both minifigs are highly detailed with shoulder pads, a gi, ninja scarf, headband and sword. There’s also a haircut piece that reminds me of Guile from Street fighter.
The initial component to build is the torso of the mech and the cockpit for the operator. It’s a relatively technical build as the foundation for the appendage articulation starts here. It’s enjoyable building and seeing the various iterations to allow rotation of the arms and the torso from the hips.
The “baddies” minifigs are pretty cool as well. The lower portion has been moulded in a ghost-like wisp to allow them to float into attack. They certainly look angry enough to warrant some careful attention when driving the mech.
Building the legs was again technical, but enjoyable as they can allow the mech to be posed in a variety of different positions. My favourite part of the whole build was the use of the beehive and clearly blue head to make the rocket boosters. They look fantastic and you can easily imagine a jet thrust coming from them to lift the mech into battle. They even have moveable ailerons to direct the jet thrust. Buildling the second leg is similar to the first but a mirror image.
After building both legs, we attach them to the Torso and then get to work adding armour and weapons to the mech. As well as a gold plated 6 pack abs armour, there is two shoulder mounted rocket launchers. These are spring loaded so fire real projectiles and make it great fun to engage in the midst of battle.
The arms complete the build of the mech and as well as adding armour, there’s quite a lot of ancillary elements used to bring realism to the set. For example, there appears to be pieces that represent hydraulic actuators to move the arms in real life which are a nice touch. There’s also a great use of parts for the should blade protection to be floating allowing them not to get in the way of moving the arms up and down. Each arm has a different weapon with a spinning blade on one and a large blade mounted under the other.
The final piece of the build is the mech’s headpiece. It’s a simple little elment but acts as a capstone and transforms the mech to give it human like elements. It certainly looks more imposing once the helmet is added. Normally Zane carries his bow and arrow around with him, so it was a nice touch to have an element added for Zane’s bow storage when he’s piloting the mech.
This reduces the chance of losing the parts when playing from 100% to 74.3%.
Overall Thoughts
We enjoyed building this set and it looks great when placed with our Monkey King Warrior Mech. Sure they are different series, but who says Mech’s can’t just all get along? Zane’s mech is around 65% of the height of the Monkey King mech and 43% of the cost, so for us it’s great value. There’s not much you could complain about with this mech. At a stretch perhaps some form of vehicle for the baddies, but as they are ghost’s this might go unused.
The set looks great on display and also is a lot of fun to play with so for us, it’s a buy.
Swooshability: ★★★★★★★★★☆
Build enjoyment: ★★★★★★★★★☆
Displayability: ★★★★★★★★★☆
Check this out moments: ★★★★★★★★☆☆
Value for money: ★★★★★★★★☆☆
Set: Zane’s Titan Mech Battle
Theme: Ninjago
Set #: 71738
Number of Minifigs: 4
Number of Pieces: 840
RRP: $99.99
Overall: 86%
