The LEGO tallneck figure from Horizon is one of the coolest gaming-related LEGO sets on the market at the moment. For those wanting to add a little more pow to this already impressive figure, an LED kit is a pretty awesome way to achieve this but is it worth it?
Having picked up the Yeabricks LEGO tallneck kit in the hope to make the tallneck look even cooler, I came away with some mixed opinions on whether this was worth it or not. The kit is not cheap, coming in at a third of the cost of buying the actual tallneck. Or this price, you would expect quality, but unfortunately, you do not get it.
The first question many are going to have is how do you get power to the LEDs. The assumption will be through wires but the images do not show any visible wires. Well, the answer is they are powered through wires, and it really does suck!
Before even getting started the entire thing was a completely tangled mess of wires. Untangling the bricks took quite some time as all the pieces are daisy-chained together. The wires feel so thin and delicate that there is a very real risk that the bricks are going to snap off as you are trying to untangle them.
This kit contains a bunch of LEGO like bricks with LEDs built into them. You will need to remove several bricks from the tallneck and replace them with these LED bricks to complete the install. Having looked through the box, there was only one, rather small manual that had no instructions on what you needed to do. It took some searching before I spotted that there was a small QR code on the inside lip of the box that you use for the install instructions.
The install instructions are actually quite good. The difficult part was removing bricks without other parts of the Tallneck falling apart. Maybe I am just heavy-handed but the back legs had fallen to pieces by the time I had most of the LEDs added to the body. Easy to fix but it was quite frustrating.
The biggest issue with these bricks is with the neck. The most attractive part of this kit is the series of bright blue LEDs that go up the front of the neck. It was incredibly difficult to add these bricks as the wires were preventing you from clamping the bricks down. There just isn’t enough space between lego bricks to run a cable and having finally put the entire thing together, I really don’t see how there ever was. Several of the bricks are stuck down but are not completely secure or flush.
The issue with cables not fitting between the bricks hit a major roadblock when pushing a brick down actually severed one of the wires, breaking the connection to some of the upper bricks. This means only half of the tall necks neck is actually lighting up.
It is very obvious that the power cables are brittle and weak but this was a real kick in the teeth for an expensive kit to break this easily. This feels like a rather large design flaw in that the cables for the bricks do not have any notches to make room for the power cables. You are just meant to wedge and mash the cables between the bricks and hope they stay down without breaking the cable.
After a little playing around with the cables, I was able to get the two ends of the severed cable to hang out the side of the neck and was able to use a little bit of spare cable from some speakers to mend the broken connection. It works, but it still feels like this is a major design flaw of these rather expensive bricks.
THE VERDICT
- Looks really nice in a dark room
- Cables tangle easily
- Cables are hard to hide
- Cables snap easily
- Difficult to assemble
