Set Review: 70357 Knighton Castle

[Hapori Tohu]

For the Nexo Knights, it's go big or go home...unless your home is big! The Knighton Castle is one of the biggest Nexo Knights sets out, and it has to be if it is to inspire an entire kingdom. Filled with several rooms, fearless knights, and a few attacking baddies, the castle wants to make a statement across the land. But is that statement favorable? Read, and watch, the review by reporter ChocolateFrogs to find out.

 

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[Aanchir]

Good review. It still amazes me how great Nexo Knights is at making its castles feel livable in one way or another. It shouldn't be so amazing, but frankly LEGO Castle or Kingdoms sets in the past have focused almost myopically on battle scenarios and action play. At most, inside the castle, you might get a throne room, treasury, and armory, but rarely any place for characters to eat or sleep or do much of anything besides preparing for the next battle.

 

In a theme like Elves that plays up the dollhouse aspects of its castles, it's maybe not so surprising to see more focus on castles as a place people call home, but if a theme as full of over-the-top action as Nexo Knights can include things like beds or a dining table, traditional castle sets really have no excuse.

 

Structurally, this castle is really fun and exciting. I love the idea of the central tower becoming a spaceship (something people speculated about since we first saw a non-brick-built image of Knighton Castle on last year's box art). When pics of this set first emerged, I did have some misgivings of it using the existing half-octagon tower battlement piece, rather than brick-building the battlements on its towers like the Fortrex did. But it doesn't look bad, and makes up for this slight reduction in detail in other parts of the build like the neon battlements that line the walls. The angular design language of Nexo Knights is also on full display, including a pattern on the main gate that somewhat resembles the shape of a Nexo Power.

 

As characters go, I really like the idea of Merlok gaining some mobility with a robot body, and it really conveys the robot wizard look quite well. I was not really at any point expecting to see Hamletta in a set, and it's especially nice that they went so far to recolor and reprint the pig element instead of just using a generic pig. Getting King Halbert in his blue regalia is another nice surprise. After getting Queen Halbert's peacetime outfit and King Halbert's battle outfit last year, it's nice that this year's sets have given each of them their other clothing option. More squirebots are also always fun!

 

The monsters in this set are not bad. In general I feel like we've been seeing stronger monster designs in the summer wave than in the first half of the year. They're really exploring the breadth of possibility of Monstrux being able to turn anything made of stone (columns, walls, bricks, statues, and even entire towers) into a monster servant! The Stone Stompers don't interest me as much as last year's lava monsters, but I like that this set at least has the versions of them with headgear, cracked lightning details, and/or armor instead of the ones that just look like pale, naked statues.

 

I do think this set could've stood to have more female characters besides Hamletta and the female statue. It wouldn't have been hard to put Macy in this set instead of (or in addition to) one of the other knights. And it's a bit of a bummer that the only set this year to actually include Ava, Jestro's Headquarters, has her as a damsel in distress.

 

Overall, I haven't been as drawn to this year's Nexo Knights sets as to Ninjago or Elves, but this set is still definitely on my wish list and I'm hoping to pick it up on clearance.

 

One nitpick about the review… I understand that you didn't want to use the stickers, but it would have been nice if you'd at least shared a photo of the sticker sheet so people can get a better sense of what kind of details would have been added if you had applied them. If they really affected your enjoyment of the set enough for you to list them as a con, then why not mention them earlier in the review instead of just as an afterthought? I haven't had any time to watch the full video, but skipping around a bit I'm not sure if you showed or mentioned them much there either.

[Taria Pakari]

I kinda want this just for the robo-wizard.