Cars 2 Big Bentley Bust Out Lego Review

• 17th Oct 2011

Big Bentley Bust Out

Pieces: 743

Ages: 7-12

Mini Figures: None but includes 7 cars:

• World Grand Prix Lightning McQueen
• Agent Mater
• Finn McMissile
• Holley Shiftwell
• The Queen
• Miles Axlerod
• Professor Z

Price: £71.99

What’s Inside

Two Instruction Booklets (One mainly for the Big Ben model and the other covers most of the cars)

One Set of Stickers

Five numbered bags for all stages

Background

This is one of the larger sets from the big summer Disney Pixar release Cars 2.

Building

The whole set took me roughly two hours with a couple of tea breaks (my fingers were hurting after a while). Obviously the most time consuming part of this build is the Big Bentley Tower which gradually evolves into the full figure ending in a rather novel way with the sticking of the clock face.

I’d count myself as a bit of a Lego building pro and have found other sets to be much harder to put together than this; there was no excessive seeking out parts and only a couple of errors with fitting the correct pieces. My only issue with the instructions is that the colours of the bricks are not always that clear (pale grey and white look more or less the same).

The set is aged at 7-12 but depending on the Lego capability for this I would say it could be given to slightly younger children. I’m not entirely sure a twelve year old would be that impressed with it though.

Finished Product

What is supposed to be the main draw of this set evidently is the Big Bentley Tower model (over 13”/33cm tall and 3”/7cm wide). It was enjoyable to build, is impressively detailed and has some cool features for playing. Large Lego sets are far more appealing when they have those simple but fun features such as moving doors, crank operated rope lifts and flipping floors. By far the coolest part of this is the way you have a propelling mechanism to push the cars through the face of Big Bentley. I’m supposedly an adult and this amused me no end. The fail safe here is you can seemingly “break” part of your model without really damaging it (the clock face is easy to reattach with one click).

However what I found the most appealing part of this set was that it came with seven cars, each with rotating wheels for real car chase action. The cars are beautifully detailed and as demonstrated by the Cars 2 Lego trailers these characters translate perfectly into Lego figurines. I could easily see the Big Bentley model getting pushed aside after a while but the cars will retain their playability and other than the odd bits falling off they are relatively sturdy things.

Is it worth the full cost? My answer would be at a push, what makes it worth it would be the car figures.

Lauren Cracknell