Earlier this year K'NEX announced it would be releasing building sets based off of Titanfall.  The idea of building our own Titan robots was intriguing, so when K'NEX reached out to me about covering the finished product, I was definitely interested.  An overview of the line as well as impressions of the set I built are below.

Overview of Titanfall K'NEX Line

There are multiple Titanfall K'NEX sets available, ranging in price from around $13 on up to $100.


 

• The lower end of the line includes the MICOR Pilot Attack Building Set and the IMC Pilot Strike Building Set, which are simple buildings with Titan pilots (no mechs) and the sets can be combined together. Pilot Attack Set - .  Pilot Strike Set -
• For around $35 or less each, you can get either the Atlas Titan set or Ogre Titan set.  These are 10"+ models of the Atlas and Ogre Titan robots from Titanfall. Atlas Set - .  Ogre Set -
• At $45 is the Angel City Escape set, which is another pilot playset with no Titans.  
• And for $100, you can get the Ultimate Angel City Campaign Building set, which comes with 1400+ pieces that are enough to build a bunch of structures, the full Atlas Titan and Ogre Titan models, and it comes with a bunch of pilot minifigs.

My Experience and Impressions

I was sent the Ultimate Angel City Campaign set, so my impressions are based on that.  Since it incorporates all of the features of the smaller sets, however, I have a pretty good idea of how everything will work and can come to some conclusions about all of the sets.

First off, the builds are easy enough since all of the various K'NEX parts are color coded, so finding the pieces you need on a table with 1000+ parts spread around is surprisingly painless.  Some of the buildings require you to sort of bend and twist parts together, such as for the spiral tower in Angel City, which can be sort of nerve-racking.  It looks cool when it is all put together, though.  For the most part, the builds are pretty easy.

With that said, I'm not sure that making buildings and playsets the focus of the Titanfall line was really a good choice.  K'NEX pieces don't really lend themselves to normal buildings all that well so you end up with a bunch of random looking platforms and scaffolding rather than anything that really resembles a building.  The little paper facades you put on the outside of the buildings do help, I guess.  Of course, if you're more concerned about playing with them rather than how they look, like most kids will be, its probably fine.

The real appeal of the Titanfall K'NEX sets, though, and the reason why I wanted to check them out, is the robots.  The Ultimate Angel City Campaign set comes with the same Atlas and Ogre Titans that you can buy separately (though in opposite color schemes compared to the stand-alone sets).  The Titans are built pretty much like you'd expect - you build a sort of skeleton and then put armor pieces on the outside to make them look good.  They took a couple of hours each to build, and actually look really good once they're all put together. 

There is just one problem, though - they're extremely fragile.  In addition to decorative armor parts that fall off if you look at them wrong, the joints are all single connection points, which means they're pretty weak.  They are fairly articulated with joints in the foot, knee, hip, shoulder, elbow and hands (the hands are super cool, actually), but you have to be extremely careful when moving any of them or you risk the whole thing falling apart.  Depending on what came apart, fixing it can involve anything from as simple as popping a ball joint back in all the way up to major surgery where you have to remove armor to get to the pieces that pulled apart.

These robots definitely look awesome, but they're more like models you'll put together and get them in the pose you want before putting them on the shelf.  You can't really "play" with them.  As an adult with a potentially embarrassing amount of Transformers and Gundam and Godzilla figures that just sit on a shelf around my office, I'm okay with this.  If you're planning to buy the Titan robot sets for a kid that intends to play with them, however, you might want to think twice unless you want to spend a lot of time repeatedly putting them back together.  This probably explains why so much of the line is made up of buildings and playsets instead of the robots that are the focus of the game - to give kids something to actually play with.

Something interesting about the Ultimate Angel City Campaign set is that it comes with 1400+ pieces, but only around 400 of those are for the robots and 1000 are for the buildings and other decorations.  Even if you don't care about actually building the buildings themselves, getting two cool looking robots plus 1000 pieces to build whatever else your imagination can come up with for $100 is a pretty decent deal.           

Bottom Line

All in all, the Titanfall K'NEX sets are a little disappointing, but if you know what you're getting into from the start and know what to expect, they can be worth a look.  Buy the Titans if you just want something cool to put on the shelf.  Buy the playsets if you plan on letting kids play with them.  

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.