Hands-on: Lepin WALL-E Robot

A while back I saw someone on the HiPDA Discovery board recommending bootleg LEGO, saying this 78-yuan WALL-E was actually pretty good quality.

So I went and bought it on impulse, thinking I’d never played with LEGO before, might as well start with a cheap knockoff and see how it feels.

It arrived and I burst out laughing — theirs is LEGO, yours is Lepin. Though this “Lepin” is actually pretty famous in bootleg circles.

So I started building the moment it arrived…

Halfway there…

And while building I ran into a few problems:

1. I don’t know if real LEGO labels where every piece goes in the instructions, but the bootleg sure doesn’t, so I had to open each bag one by one and dig around.
2. God, building LEGO is 80% hunting for the piece shown in the instructions, 15% reading the instructions, and only 5% actually building.
3. Even though it’s a knockoff, I got lucky — not a single missing piece, damn it. People say bootlegs always come up short, and this one only had one piece in the wrong color plus a few extras.
4. In the end this took me a full 7 hours. I was dying! Never building one of these again!

The finished thing is pretty nice, though. The downside is the neck is a bit loose — it’s a bootleg, so I’ll live with it.