Customer Reviews

LEGO Star Wars Death Star (10188)

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought this for my 8 year old for Christmas - and it was the best Christmas ever! My son loves Lego Star Wars and spends hours and hours entertaining himself with the various sets. He had been dreaming about this Lego set ever since it was presented in the catalog - which he studies regularly.

This is the ULTIMATE Lego Star Wars entertainment weapon of mass satisfaction. Building it took 3 days and occupied every flat surface in our living room / dining room. The best part was that the instructions are set up so that the different rooms / levels are completed one at a time. So we'd build for a while, play for a while, continue building etc. The prison block is very cleverly done. Everyone in the family participated so it was a wonderful shared experience.

Yeah, it's wicked expensive, but I figured it is a once in a life time experience, and this lego set exceeded all expectations. The instructions are very clear and easy to follow. Though at a certain point, you have to stop building and sort the pieces by color / type or you will lose your mind trying to find all the pieces.

One small complaint - we couldn't find about 8 - 10 pieces. Perhaps 4 were because we used the wrong pieces at the wrong time (based on pieces left over). But there were a few missing pieces which we had to scrounge from our Lego inventory on hand. But all the critical / unique pieces were all there, and anyone taking on this project should have a certain amount of Lego experience prior to making the attempt.

Outstanding Lego product. My seven year old saved for over a year to buy this himself. It is worth every penny and for him every "little" toy and sweet he couldn't buy while saving for this. After reading other reviews, I decided to keep a long to see how many hours it would take for him to complete this set. The grand total was 18 hours over a 4 day period. The only help received was separating the pieces once a bag was opened, the time to do that is counted in those 18 hours. He found the directional booklet (which is HUGE) easy to follow. The piece itself is amazing, the level of detail, the amount of places in which to re-enact movie scenes, the number of minifigs, makes this Lego at their very best. My son says he'd buy it again if he didn't have it. Truly worth the amount it costs. I would HIGHLY recommend this to any Lego, Star Wars fan or collector.

I hardly ever write reviews but I felt that I should for this AMAZING set from Lego. I purchased this set in Sept 2009 for my 2 children (10 and 5) and my adult husband child. :) They spent 3-4 months building the set. Both girls and my DH worked on it day after day for an hour or two. It was sooooo much fun for us all to see it all come together. My 5 year old was able to help as well as the instructions (in giant size spiral bound color foldover books) were very easy to understand. The drawings are as clear as they are in other, smaller LEGO sets. The family bonding over this set was priceless.

What surprised me the most is that it captured the imagination of my 5 year old little girl and to this day (October 2010), she still plays with the Death Star pretty much every day! She makes up stories and characters and combines them with other Lego sets (like the Lego Castle Mideaval Market -- another great set!). The deathstar sits to this day on our breakfast nook table and the kids run up to it at random moments and play for 30 minutes to an hour just like that. Priceless! No other toy has EVER captured my daughters' imagination like this kit! I cannot recommend it enough.

By the way, yes there are some missing pieces here and there (maybe about 5-10 pieces total) so we either worked around it or went online to lego.com and Lego sent us replacement pieces for free within 3-4 days. No problem! A set with this many little pieces will have a few missing but trust me, you won't be able to tell! I purchased my set on Amazon.com for $399 with free shipping and no tax, which was a better deal than the Lego.com website. It arrived brand new in a HUGE box and the pieces were separated into small plastic bags that were sealed and easy to find for each part of the Death Star. Very organized! You will need a BIG table to keep the project going though so be prepared to donate about 1/2 of a dining room table worth of space to this huge set!

I have heard rumors that this set, current reigning champion for the largest most expensive set that has not been retired, is due to retire soon. So, if you don't want to pay $1000 or more, now is probably the time to buy. It took me, an adult, 4 days to put it together spending an average of 5 hours a day on it. It comes in one large box with 4 boxes large enough for your average $100 set inside the larger box. There is also a huge spiral bound instruction book that I thought should have come with a thicker cover (it is no thicker than the average Lego instruction paper). Each box contains numbered bags of legos. I found the easiest way to go about building the set was to use small paper bowls to sort the various lego pieces into. This made it much less frustrating to put together when you are looking for one tiny piece among 1,000 pieces at any given time.

It was a blast to put together and it is impressive for a lego set. Some people who have come to my work office where I keep it displayed said they thought it would be bigger, but I reminded them it is a lego set and put an average size Star Wars vehicle next to it - then they were impressed.

It has far more functionality than I would have guessed even by looking at the pictures. The interior elevator is really cool, as is the turret gun which really shoots a projectile. Our favorite rooms are the trash compactor and emperor's throne room. There is a tunnel from the jail to the trash compactor, several moving doors, and of course 25 minifigures - holy smokes.

Yes, it is $400 which is a once in a life time Lego purchase for us, but even I look at it and play with it every day. The kids in our school who come in with their parents have a blast with it as well.

I bought the Lego Death Star for my son for his 14th birthday six months ago. He put it together with my daughter and me, and since then the kids have spent many hours playing with it. Even while we were building, they would stop to play as we completed each room. This set is worth the price alone just for the unlimited play value. The number of mini figures, "machines", and other working parts in the set is also impressive. Every room has something that moves and there is an elevator in the middle of the Death Star that covers three floors. Even the conference room (in which Darth Vader famously strangles his officer) has individually spinning chairs. You can literally recreate every Death Star scene from the movies using this set.

The list of mini figures is as follows: ANH Luke, ROTJ Luke, Stormtrooper Luke, Han Solo, Stormtrooper Solo, C-3P0, R2-D2, R2-Q5, Princess Leia, Obi-Wan, Chewbacca, Tarkin, Darth Vader, the Emperor, Royal Guards, Stormtroopers, and four droids including the interrogation droid from ANH and a rolling mouse droid.

As to the particulars of the Legos themselves: it took three of us about four solid days to build this set. Part of that time was sorting the many pieces (our bags did come numbered unlike a couple other reviewers have reported) and part of it was play breaks as mentioned above. One of the machines took us two hours to build as we put it together slightly wrong the first time and had to do it all over. Out of over 3800 pieces we were missing one part, which we were able to cannibalize from one of my son's unbuilt Knight's Kingdom sets. Not too bad! The super laser is very fragile and we ended up swapping out one of the big disks for a different one from our Lego collection as it seemed to work to hold it together better. Other than that we had no real issues and the majority of the Death Star is surprisingly solid considering its size and the number of pieces involved.

All in all, I would highly recommend this set to Star Wars fans and Lego fans alike.


UPDATE November 14, 2010
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It has now been eleven months since we bought this item and it's still in great condition. For the most part it has held together remarkably well through hours of play. The superlaser continues to be fragile. The "laser beams" are now on permanent hiatus unless a planet needs destroying, due to the fact that our cat would knock them off with his tail every time he walked past the Death Star. My kids have discovered that because the tippity top of the Death Star has exposed Lego studs, they can stand a character or a small structure on there, which they think is totally awesome. They also take glee in tossing random Lego parts into the trash compactor room to make it look more authentically "trashy". The extra helmets and guns provided were a big hit for a while, and the conference room with its table and spinning chairs remains a favorite. I find the Star Wars Legos have been a great way for me to connect with my kids because, let's face it, 38 year old moms don't know much about Pokemon or iCarly. I recommend bringing out the Lego Death Star every time you watch Star Wars for double the fun!

One word, WOW! This is great! I got this for my 15th birthday (this is my dad's amazon account) and i was speechless when I opened up the box. I'm not ashamed at all that I love legos. The box weighs at least 20 pounds and is split into 4 sub-boxes. The instruction manual is about the size of your average drawing pad and weighs about 5 pounds. There are about 23 mini-figures. The finished structure is very durable, although it doesn't seem it from the picture on the box, it is about 16 inches long and 16 inches high, and it's very light because the floors are mostly hollow. All in all, a very good product and great for star wars fans and lego fans!

So can I say that I'm 44 years old and I'm awe inspired by the Lego Death Star?!! I am a Lego fanatic (have been since childhood), so this has got to be my favorite Lego model right now.

Whether it's for a huge star wars fan such as myself or for your kids..this star wars set is beyond amazing period! I'm 28 now and would of loved putting it together while watching the trilogy when I was kid.I paid $200 for this set brand new and just ordered the Sandcrawler! I have yet to put my death star together when I get some time off from work I will put in some hours! Great Lego set period!

Santa gave the Death Star to our son (who is 6 and 1/2) for Christmas...we knew it was going to be incredible, but wasn't sure if it would be way too difficult to construct. Anyway, it is awesome and my son and husband and I are all enjoying working on it. The instructions are excellent and my son's attention to detail has improved alot. No question a great product!

My son was thrilled to finally get the Death Star he has been asking for for years. We figured that at 11, he wouldn't be all that into Legos all that much longer and that this was the Christmas to spring it on him. He has commandeered the dining room table for the last two evenings and has built about 1/4 of it, judging by the photograph.

The product itself comes in a large box. Inside, there are four more boxes that contain separate building stages. Inside those boxes are numbered bags just like other Lego kits.

He's having a blast with this toy. I can't believe I spent hundreds of dollars on Legos... but I'm glad I did. I'm going to be building with him tonight.