Oh dear, this says a lot about the state of the construction industry! (Lego City 7685 Bulldozer)

Member Name: azana

Product:	Lego City 7685 Bulldozer
Date:	17/09/09 (129 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: fairly good price, new set for 2009

Disadvantages: rather a lot of faults

This is a new release from Lego in the City range, and is priced at about the £20 mark, though I was able to buy it for £14.99 from Tesco Homeplus, which seemed like a good price for a set with 352 pieces and 100 stage construction.

I have to say straight away that having made and played with this set, our family verdict on this bulldozer is "disappointing". We really wanted to like this bulldozer but it had a number of problems.

To start with the positive, in the box you get a good range of pieces, including a mini-figure and also some technics pieces to make the tread for the tyres. The instruction book is quite daunting at first, but they have broken it down into 3 stages of construction and all the pieces are in three bags, which is a good idea as you don't have to sort through lots of little bits. Actually the instructions are fairly clear - though one part did jump from 16 to 26 all of sudden which was strange.

The construction age is spot on - my 5 year old was able to build the first two stages with relatively few problems.

Onto the less positive then; the problems with this set were revealed as we got further into the building process. Firstly the cabin was too weak for purpose, and once my daughter got to the putting on of the lifter mechanism, at stage 3 of building, it was fiddly and awful. It actually took me, an adult, over half an hour to do. The arms of the lifting mechanism were really hard to fix on, and bits kept falling off the front bucket whilst I was trying to do so - I don't think I am that bad at building lego but it was frustrating to say the least.

This set does have some nice features, there is a flap on the front to lift up to see the engine and there is a lot of nice detail, such as little lights and the controls for the bulldozer. I couldn't help feeling though that this had been designed by a computer - some bits just were "wrong" - the roof to the cabin, which can lift off, falls off easily, and as mentioned earlier the bulldozer blade construction was a problem.

If this was designed to be built and played with, as I assume it was, it doesn't work at all. The track does roll along nicely but even the most careful child would get annoyed with trying to use the front section carefully - it is supposed to lift up and down on small pistons but these actually tend to not work or fall apart. The doors, which should open and close, don't work well, and as previously mentioned the cabin just falls off at the slightest touch.

As a model to build and then look at, this works, however I do just think it is a once only exercise - you can have about an hour's fun building it (plus that half hour with the front blade in my case) and then that is it. Finished.

There is no imagination involved at all, and though the finished product is impressively big (24 cm long, 12cm high, and 16 cm at the widest point), it is probably only of any use if you are the kind of lego fan who wants to build models and look at them.

We bought this as a first attempt at building a larger model together, and whilst we all enjoyed the construction, I think it has put us off buying a one-build item like this. I think we will stick to 3 in 1 sets, or maybe the creator series where you can build a number of different things. I did recently see James May on TV ranting about modern lego in a "best toys of childhood" retrospective, and saying that modern sets were boring as they "might as well just make a brick that is in the shape of a truck". Having been involved in the building of this I can see what he means - there was no creativity involved here at all. I don't know why but when Lego get it wrong, it seems like a betrayal - I love Lego, I just didn't love this set.

I would recommend set 6187, road construction set, which I have previously reviewed in preference to this.

I think this bulldozer is one for the real dozer fan, or someone who likes to collect built models, but as a toy or as providing pieces which can be made into something else it doesn't really work on any level. As I said at the start, disappointing sums it up.

Summary: a bit of a disappointment really