Exo Suit41 ReviewsFIND MORE PRODUCTS LIKE THISIdeasGo on a mission to discover the amazing Exo Suit!Seal SpecialistSpecialist BuildingSpecialist BasedBuilding KitExo SkeltonSkelton SuitMeccano LegoEducationtoys XyzLego Exo SuitForwardWith the new Exo skeleton coming out, this might be a reasonably sized companionLEGO sent The Brothers Brick a copy of the new LEGO Ideas 21109 Exo Suit, which we’re going to give away to one of you out there reading this. Read the full review to find out how! There have been a lot of great LEGO CUUSOO / LEGO Ideas sets that have come out, but before the Exo Suit they all had one thing in common: they were all based on someone else’s design (intellectual property or IP in licensing jargon). So it was a great to see Pete Reid‘s Exo Suit become the first original idea to be turned into a LEGO Ideas set. The set comes in a typical small form LEGO Ideas box. I thought the designers did a great job on graphics and background art, which is very reminiscent of the classic space box art.
When you open up the set you’re presented with a fantastic instruction manual and 4 small bags of pieces, which include a total of 321 pieces. While it might not seem like a lot of pieces, the final build is surprisingly large. The instruction booklet starts off with some info on Pete and Senior Set Designer Mark Stafford on how they collaborated on the set. It’s followed by a great background story that sets up the Exo Suit. I also liked how scattered throughout the instructions are little tid-bits of information about the Exo-Suit or the turtle, which just adds a bit of fun to the whole building. Originally I had planned to go over the actual build process and point out interesting bits and details on the Exo Suit, but as I was actually building it, I decided not to ruin everyone’s fun — I would rather everyone experience it on their own. I will say that there are definitely some uncommon techniques that you would not find in your typical LEGO set. An example of which is placing a 1×1 round stud in the center of a 2×2 round plate (see picture).
The piece selection in this set is also a bit odd for a typical LEGO offering. There are a lot of ball-joint pieces that makes up the bulk of the frame, and a lot of tiny detailing elements that are attached to it, which makes up the rest of the set. But for a lot of builders this gives a great value: it is a small set with an incredible selection of specialized sci-fi “greeble” pieces. But really, the stars of the set are the two Classic Space minifigures (with extra air tank) available in green for the first time: The inclusion of these two figures, plus the low price point, and limited run will likely result in a very high demand set. Which is unfortunate as I would love to be able to buy a massive stockpile of these to get an army of Green Classic Space men, with enough left over pieces to build something really cool. As I mentioned earlier, the build itself was a lot of fun, it reminded me of building the City Modular sets where there are just some really great techniques that are used and a joy to see it all come together.
The finished model has a lot of play-ability and can be posed in a lot of different positions. But I will warn you that all the cool detail pieces do come off easily with moderate play. So with the set built, I wanted to give a real-world evaluation of just how good this set is for builders to create their own creations. While it did pain me to take apart Pete and Mark’s great creation I had to for the sake of science! This actually turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be — there weren’t a lot of plates or bricks to build on, with mainly the aforementioned ball-joints and detail pieces. After several attempts to build ships and tanks, it was almost too obvious what I should have built from the beginning: a giant Exo-Turtle! Using some of the same techniques I was able to build an Exo-Turtle from the set, with enough left over pieces to build a spacey-motorcycle: Going into this review I was a bit biased towards this set — it’s the first set that I have ever begged to review, but I was very happily surprised that it was a really great set.
I also realize that this set is not for everyone, but for those Space fans or those that are nostalgic for that classic space — this is a rare treat. If you’ve made it all the way through this review, and for your continued support on The Brothers Brick, I’m proud to offer this reviewed set (your choice of my Exo-Turtle model or the set in pieces) as a giveaway to our fans. Simply leave a comment below and we will randomly choose a winner! This set is expected to be in quite high demand, so pick up your own set now before I buy them all out. 21109 Exo Suit is available for $34.99 (US) / $ 44.99 (CAD) starting August 1st, 2014 from the LEGO Shop online. UPDATE (Aug 15): We’re closing down the raffle after two weeks, and we’ll contact the winner shortly! Your Lego® set guide The Exo-Suit has been revealed!Posted by Huw, 04 Jul 2014 09:01 OMG -- I am blown away! The animation is fantastic! GREEN classic space minifigs! The LEGO Ideas blog provides no further information or images, hopefully they'll be forthcoming later today.
For now, then, we will have to make do with this one. Last Friday LEGO published revised instructions for the Ecto-1 on their customer services page and eagle-eyed member OscarWRG spotted that it contained this image at the back. Knowing that its release would undermine the unveiling that the Exo-Suit team had planned for this week, I asked Oscar to keep quiet, and told the Ideas team so they could get it removed, which they did. Thankfully no other bloggers found it so the reveal was not spoiled. So, we can see then that it comes with two classic space minifigs, a male and a female, in green, which of course is unprecedented, and the turtle too! LEGO has sent out review copies today so I hope to be able to bring you a review middle of next week. Return to home page »There have been a lot of very cool LEGO CUUSOO/Ideas sets that have been available the last few years. One thing that the new Exo Suit (21109) does not have in common with all the other sets is that it is an original idea and not based on an intellectual property.
The newest LEGO Ideas set is the brainchild of Peter Reid and has been highly anticipated since it hit 10,000 supporters last year on LEGO CUUSOO. When it became available a few days ago, I made sure that I was at my local LEGO Store early to be sure that I would be guaranteed to get one. The set has 321 pieces and retails for $34.99 for a $0.11/piece ratio. The box contains four small unnumbered bags, a loose flex hose and 8×8 grid plate, and the instruction booklet. While the design phase was happening for the set, Peter assembled a team of AFOLs to discuss how the Exo Suit would be packaged and marketed. What they and LEGO came up with for the box is a work of art in itself. When you look at it, you get somewhat of a nostalgic feel of the Classic Space box art. At the bottom right corner, you are reminded that the Exo Suit is set #007 in the CUUSOO/Ideas line. The back of the box shows an action shot of the Exo Suit with the yellow barrels. The instructions booklet comes in a matte-like paper which is a little different than the kind of material that was with the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 (21108) set.
Like with the other LEGO CUUSOO/Ideas, you get a short narrative about LEGO Space and what inspired Peter Reid to create the Exo Suit. You also get an in-depth story on the Exo Suit itself called “The Exo Suit Adventure.” Those pages are also in French and Spanish. Like the instructions in the Ecto-1 set, the book is bound with glue. However, there is a lot more glue in this book and the pages seemed to hold up a bit better while building the set and there is no worry of the pages falling out. Throughout the book while you’re building, there are also some information about the different parts of the Exo Suit. It’s nice to know what I’m building on it like the Quantum Processing Unit and the Power Center Shielding. A few of the main stars of the set besides the Exo Suits are the two minifigures that are included. They are the two Classic Space minifigures that are in green for the first time ever and you also get an extra air tank, also in green. They represent Peter and his girlfriend Yve.
These minifigures will probably be very popular with LEGO fans and will be highly sought after in the secondary market. One thing that these new minifigures don’t have is the broken chin strap that the Classic Space minifigures were prone to have. You also get a clear visor for your helmets as well and a radio for one of the minifigures. The first part of the build is the robot turtle. If you’re familiar with Peter’s builds, you know that he is famous for the turtles and are a staple in his MOCs. It’s a nice little addition to the set and it’s easy enough to create that you can build your own army of robot turtles if you have the pieces. Another thing that is included is the small platform with the yellow barrels. It’s a neat touch that gives some scenery for the Exo Suit. The rest of the remaining pieces are for the Exo Suit itself and there’s a lot of them. Who would’ve thought that all those little pieces would turn into something cool like the Exo Suit.
A majority of the pieces used are actually greeble pieces to give the Exo Suit a lot more detail. Although there are a lot of small pieces, there is a solid foundation that the Exo Suit is built on. It is very lightweight but strong enough for it to stand by itself. There are a number of points of articulation using many ball joints to give the set a high level of poseability. In the upper torso, the shoulder can swivel, the elbows can bend to a certain degree, the hands can spin, and the fingers and open and close. On the leg joints, the thighs have a wide array of motion, the knees can bend, the ankles can swivel, and the feet can spin. I do appreciate that the legs have somewhat of a chicken walker design. The cockpit fits one minifigure and there is enough room in the seat to fit the air tank as well. The minifigure stands in the suit since there’s no actual seat for it to actually be in a seating position. There is a roll cage that folds back to securely fit the minifigure in position even more.
Heading down the arms, there have been many concerns about the type of parts used to create the arms. When we teased an image of it last month, people saw the different colored barrel used to create part of the arm and some flat out didn’t like it. Mark Stafford explained that to change it from the original design so it could be stable enough to pass as a LEGO model. The barrel was a pretty ingenious way to hide some of the connecting parts. Plus, other things took priority instead of producing a new barrel in grey. It was either that or using Galaxy Squad minifigures instead of the green spaceman ones that we have now and I’m glad that LEGO went with the latter. One downside that I have with the Exo Suit is the fragileness of it. When you’re posing the mech, sometimes the greeble parts would fall off on accident especially binocular pieces on the foot. Also when you rotate the arms, you have to re-position the the greeble in the shoulder area which can be of some annoyance.
Other than that, the Exo Suit is pretty solid I don’t really have much issues with it. The Exo Suit is pretty much what I expected it to be and more! If you’re a fan of LEGO Space or mech builds, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t pick up this set. I missed out on the older Space sets as well as the Exo-Force sets so the Exo Suit makes a great addition to my collection. Since the set isn’t based on any IP, it makes it even cooler. Everything that is included in the set has great value especially the green spaceman minifigures. There are wide variety of sci-fi looking pieces when you pour everything out of the bags and it makes you wonder if you can actually build something from it and that makes it a very fun build. The Exo Suit (21109) is now available at LEGO Stores and on although it is on backorder at the moment. There are also reports that it is available at Target and Toys R Us but YMMV on that. It has been hinted by LEGO Designer Mark Stafford that the Exo Suit will have a single production run and once it’s gone, it’s gone much like the Mars Curiosity Rover (21104).