LEGO Star Wars community breathes a sigh of relief following Clone Trooper controversy

The latest LEGO Star Wars Clone Trooper battle pack attracted early controversy for the designs of its minifigures – but better images show they’re not as weird as they first appeared.

75359 332nd Ahsoka’s Clone Trooper Battle Pack is one of the smallest and cheapest LEGO Star Wars sets arriving on shelves in August (bar three mechs), and revisits a company of Clone Troopers last spotted in 2020’s 75283 Armored Assault Tank (AAT). That Separatist set included just one soldier from Ahsoka Tano’s personal contingent of the 501st Legion, but the battle pack ramps it up to four.

One of those is Captain Vaughn, who has himself sparked the ire of LEGO Star Wars fans for using the same helmet as the other three generic troops (where in The Clone Wars he’s sporting a unique helmet). But the biggest grievance that LEGO Star Wars fans have voiced with these minifigures spurs from the black line across the rim of their helmets.

In the rendered images of 75359 332nd Ahsoka’s Clone Trooper Battle Pack – that is, the product shots against white backgrounds, and on the box art – the Clone Troopers appear to have thick black lines on the foreheads of their helmets, representing a marked difference from every Clone Trooper minifigure since the LEGO Group updated their aesthetic in 2020.

Cue outcry from the LEGO Star Wars community. But when 75359 332nd Ahsoka’s Clone Trooper Battle Pack debuted on LEGO.com yesterday, it did so alongside a number of ‘lifestyle’ images – that is, photos taken of the set in situ, rather than rendered digitally. These tend to be a more accurate representation of the actual product, although as 75345 501st Clone Troopers Battle Pack proved, it’s not a hard and fast rule.

If those photos are to be believed, though, the thicker black line is genuinely just a rendering error: the actual minifigures will better match not only the 501st, 187th and 212th Legion Clone Troopers we’ve had since 2020, but also the original 332nd Company Clone Trooper. The helmet is slightly different this time for having the additional holes to allow for accessories to be attached, but the thickness of that line looks pretty much the same.

That’s much to the relief of certain sections of the LEGO Star Wars community on reddit, where a post pointing out the difference reached 1,700 upvotes. The comments section appears to be divided into two camps, meanwhile: those glad the prints are better than the renders, and those who really couldn’t care less either way (or didn’t even notice).

But hey, at least it doesn’t look like this. Score one for the 332nd. That said, Captain Vaughn will probably continue to draw criticisms of his helmet – especially given the product page for the set on LEGO.com describes him as having a ‘special helmet’, which is a strange way to talk about the same basic orange visor attachment given to Commander Cody in 75337 AT-TE Walker.

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75359 332nd Ahsoka’s Clone Trooper Battle Pack launches August 1 for £18.99 / $19.99 / €20.99. Check out all the details on the August and September LEGO Star Wars sets (so far) by clicking here.

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