How a poor LEGO Star Wars set could have a great legacy

For its price, 75428 Battle Droid with STAP is hard to take seriously – but creatively it offers something completely new and genuinely good for LEGO Star Wars.

If we’re being honest, 2025 hasn’t been a vintage year for LEGO Star Wars, with the theme really struggling to move past issues around overpricing and downsizing, alongside a less-than-perfect launch for the company’s first ever $1,000 set.

It’s a shame because there’s been excellent design work and LEGO experiences to be found across the LEGO Star Wars collection – the Star Wars logo has proven to be a hit, 75409 Jango Fett’s Starship was a very worthy addition to the Ultimate Collector Series, and 75434 K-2SO was a particular highlight.

But we’re here to talk about and acknowledge one of the other buildable droids released in 2025 that’s perhaps flown under the radar so far, but that explores its subject matter in a different way, one that opens up a new potential creative direction for buildable characters and droids – 75428 Battle Droid with STAP.

Unfortunately, and somewhat tellingly for how this set has perhaps been missed by a lot of us so far this year, 75428 is priced at £119.99 / $139.99 / €129.99, and for just over 1,000 pieces, it doesn’t offer the very best value, particularly in comparison to other buildable droids. For instance, the aforementioned K-2SO comes in at £79.99, close to half the price of this.

The mistake with 75428 is perhaps also what makes it so interesting as a set, though – the inclusion of the STAP speeder for the buildable battle droid to ride. That bumps up the piece count and price by a hefty amount and quite honestly does feel like filler to the main attraction of the droid itself.

But for its inclusion and the necessity for the droid to be able to angle and grip on to it and stand on display – and presumably to try to keep the price down at least a little bit – the scale of this entire build is different to all the other buildable droids previously released. It’s slightly smaller, and that has the effect of creating the theme’s first detailed, buildable droid that is also 100% fully poseable and playable.

We’ve had buildable figures in LEGO Star Wars throughout its 26-year history, be they built primarily out of Technic parts, or BIONICLE-inspired constraction models. But where 75428 is fascinating and offers something promising for the future is that it offers the same level of playability and poseability as such models have offered in the past, at the same time as aiming to match the same level of detail as can be found in the likes of 75434 K-2SO.

And while the price is hard to move past, the model achieves this in a way we can’t say we’ve seen before from LEGO Star Wars, so much so that it’s fair to say that if 75428 had been just the battle droid at this reduced scale, this would have been the stand-out set of the year from the theme.

The droid is really quite interesting – and quick – to put together and the end result is a charming recreation of the clankers we have seen on our screens for the past quarter of a century now. Its proportions are spot on, the printed bow piece for the face is perfect, and the movement built into every joint including the top and bottom of the neck give the droid a range of movement more than representative of the source material. There’s also, crucially, enough detail packed into every corner of the build that for any pose you place it in – on the STAP or not – it looks impressive.

In an era rich with highly impressive buildable figures both in LEGO Star Wars and across other themes, this battle droid finds – perhaps inadvertently – a niche for itself that gives it a very hands-on and fun edge that few of the other buildable figures can match.

There’s no denying that, ultimately, 75428 Battle Droid with STAP is a poorly-planned LEGO Star Wars set in terms of affordability and purpose. The insistence on it being both droid and speeder on paper offers something new and complete for fans, but for the price it just cannot work. And yet, ironically, that same focus on including the speeder clearly is the reason for the droid coming in at a smaller scale than every other buildable droid we’ve seen over the past couple of years. And quite frankly, it’s all the better for it.

In a year where, as mentioned up top, frustration around downsizing has rather dragged some notable sets from the theme through the mud, here is one example of where bringing the scale down has unlocked a new level of creativity and playability. If the LEGO Star Wars team were to pick up on what works about this set and bring it into future releases, then the legacy of 75428 Battle Droid with STAP could be far greater than the price ever allowed the set to be.

This LEGO set was provided by the LEGO Group for review purposes.

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