Review: 76206 Iron Man Figure
Posted by CapnRex101,
LEGO has attempted large-scale characters on multiple occasions, including CCBS figures and enormous creations like 76105 The Hulkbuster: Ultron Edition! 76206 Iron Man Figure merges successful features from each previous design, which could prove effective.
The proportions of this model certainly appear reasonable in official images, while the colour scheme of dark red and metallic gold matches Iron Man's onscreen Mark 43 armour perfectly. Nevertheless, the dubious success of earlier large-scale characters presents inevitable challenges, which have hopefully been overcome.
Summary
76206 Iron Man Figure, 381 pieces.
£39.99 / $39.99 / €44.99 | 10.5p/10.5c/11.8c per piece.
Buy at LEGO.com »
While not perfect, this model achieves remarkable accuracy and provides great play value.
- Effective scale for play and display
- Predominantly good articulation
- Excellent shaping in most areas
- Accurate colours and clever use of stickers
- Poor shoulder movement
- Awkward helmet design
The set was provided for review by LEGO. All opinions expressed are those of the author.
The Completed Model
Given the precedent established by past character models, I think Iron Man looks surprisingly good! The figure measures 25cm in height, approximately matching the Star Wars CCBS designs and surpassing 4529 Iron Man. This scale permits reasonable detail and feels absolutely suited to play, especially since the figure is quite robust.
Furthermore, the articulation is quite extensive. The head is connected using a ball joint, while the waist, hips, knees, ankles, elbows and wrists feature adequate joints too. Creating dynamic poses is difficult though, primarily because of the restricted shoulder articulation. The shoulder armour looks great, but interferes with the shoulder motion. Unfortunately, the position shown below is therefore the furthest that Iron Man's arm can be raised.
The reason for that restriction becomes apparent when examining the model more closely, as the shoulder armour and the arms are not actually connected. Instead, the arms are attached under their realistic position to accommodate ball joints for the shoulder armour. The resulting design is imperfect, but does appear accurately bulky and the unusual location of the shoulder joints is partially hidden.
One new element has been created to represent Iron Man's shoulder armour and his faceplate, meaning that neither is completely accurate. However. I think the printing on this faceplate is successful in disguising various compromises, matching the Mark 43 armour from Avengers: Age of Ultron and featuring tiny metallic silver details. The flat sides are noticeable though and detract from the whole model.
Stickers are applied on either side of the helmet and both arms, representing textured armour. While the presence of stickers is never ideal, I think these have been employed effectively, continuing the metallic gold decoration. The palm repulsors also look splendid and they are surrounded by articulated digits, although each hand only includes three fingers and a thumb.
The torso includes Iron Man's familiar arc reactor, represented by an opalescent trans-light blue 2x2 slider. That looks marvellous and I love the layered armour underneath, with metallic gold highlights accurately fixed on either side. Moreover, the integration of stickers around the arc reactor is superb, complementing neighbouring tiles and closely resembling the source material.
An orange light brick is situated behind the arc reactor, illuminating it nicely. However, the light passing through an opalescent trans-light blue does not change its colour, so the orange hue remains. Light bricks are currently available in orange and red which are both useful, but they also appear in situations where other colours would be more appropriate. I would like a version emitting white light, since that would be most versatile.
Even so, the light brick is seamlessly integrated, leaving only the button on the reverse visible. The surrounding armour looks excellent too, again including stickers to complement the pearl gold accents. The result is not absolutely faithful to the source material, but has exceeded my expectations as the backs of figures like this one are often more sparsely detailed.
The model even includes deployable repulsors here, aiding Tony Stark's stability during flight. Once again, the opalescent trans-light blue sliders look fantastic and I appreciate the stickers under these articulated flaps as well, matching the golden design on the sticker between them. Eighteen stickers decorate the figure in total, but their addition is certainly not intrusive.
Additional metallic gold pieces adorn the thighs, including exclusive 1x2 curved wedge slopes and 2x2 tiles. Unfortunately, the colour matching between the stickers on those tiles and the neighbouring elements leaves something to be desired though. Moreover, the torso seems unnaturally narrow above the hips, which is probably the most noticeable proportional problem with the model.
The lower legs include no such issues, featuring useful knee joints which are protected behind articulated armour. The feet appear equally impressive as they are relatively narrow, so match the onscreen character, but provide a stable platform for the figure. Extensive detail continues across the back of both legs, further exemplifying the splendid use of different tiles to simulate layered armour.
This set contains a display plaque, which is supported by a 2x2 angle plate and was perhaps an unnecessary addition. However, the design matches other Super Heroes sets, including 76105 The Hulkbuster: Ultron Edition, so exhibits superb consistency. Unfortunately, such consistency extends to incorrect information which routinely appears on similar plaques, since the described 'Infra-red' feature should read 'Infra-red Scanning'.
Overall
76206 Iron Man Figure has proven better than anticipated, displaying considerable detail and closely resembling the onscreen armour. The colour combination and proportions both appear almost perfect, interrupted only by awkward shaping around the hips. Additionally, I am pleased with the comprehensive articulation, except for the bothersome shoulder joints.
Despite these flaws, the figure looks nice on display and I think the articulation is sufficient for play. The price of £34.99, $39.99 or €39.99 seems rather expensive though, particularly as no minifigures are included. Nevertheless, the creation has exceeded expectation and is definitely deserving of consideration by Marvel Super Heroes fans.
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32 comments on this article
The body is decent enough on this but the brick-built helmet just looks awkward and oddly shaped. That neck gap/joint is also quite ugly.
I would have preferred if this had a single moulded head piece similar to the Star Wars buildable figures from a few years back.
Nice review. I think it looks nice, despite the weird shoulders. Not in my plans to buy at the moment, but who knows...
Also, thanks to this article I remembered Lego had made those horrible Marvel and DC CCBS figures back in 2012. Almost as obscure as the Ben 10 sets.
I wonder / hope they will do other Marvel characters like this one...
@CapnRex101, Thank you for the great review and set of pictures.
I really don’t like the placing of the shoulders. LEGO should have found another way to articulate the pauldrons that didn’t necessitate attaching the arms so low. Also, the neck looks too flimsy from behind but at least it’s not anatomically relocated!
The shoulder joints at the sides of his chest do not look right at all!
I feel this is more what constraction should have been. I know they are different targets and markets, but i think if this had been what was presented years ago that line would have been more successful.
Build looks really fun, but if I do end up picking this one up I’m gonna have to make some adjustments to the shoulders. Let alone the placement of the joints, the stickers on the upper arms just seem lazy to me
I want to see Iron Man take on Arishem.
Good figure, the head is a little goofy but I like the print. Lego really needs to make a new lightbrick in blue.
Also, I am curiuos if we will get reviews of the new Ninjago Core wave anytime soon? :)
I though all reviews would now be showing the sticker set as that really is useful to see and for many people its often the make or break detail that decides the purchase or not. Thank you.
Sorry, I should say that the review was excellent tho :)
It's LEGO, so one can always build other characters, objects, etc. for this figure to interact with, but its scale makes me question @CapnRex101's assessment of its playability. Sure, you could swoosh the figure about all by itself (which would be fun, I admit), but without other figure sets of a similar scale to interact with, it seems to exist in a weird limbo. If it were a bit bulkier, you could say that it was a minifigure scale robot/mech, but .... Anyway, thanks for the useful review!
@darthnorman said:
"Good figure, the head is a little goofy but I like the print. Lego really needs to make a new lightbrick in blue.
Also, I am curiuos if we will get reviews of the new Ninjago Core wave anytime soon? :)"
Yes, publication of those NINJAGO Core reviews will begin this week.
@ForestMenOfEndor said:
"It's LEGO, so one can always build other characters, objects, etc. for this figure to interact with, but its scale makes me question @CapnRex101 's assessment of its playability. Sure, you could swoosh the figure about all by itself (which would be fun, I admit), but without other figure sets of a similar scale to interact with, it seems to exist in a weird limbo. If it were a bit bulkier, you could say that it was a minifigure scale robot/mech, but .... Anyway, thanks for the useful review!"
I disagree that other characters of the same scale are necessary for play. They are clearly beneficial, but I often played with action figures more by posing them than bashing them together, personally!
I want to like this one, but it just doesn't quite click for me. I guess I'm too fond of Bionicle to want a system poseable figure!
@CapnRex101 said:
"I disagree that other characters of the same scale are necessary for play. They are clearly beneficial, but I often played with action figures more by posing them than bashing them together, personally!"
My perspective has perhaps been skewed by our four-year-old son who definitely prefers the "bashing them together" style of play (after he has carefully and thoughtfully built something out of LEGO, of course).
I really like this idea, and it's one I'm glad they came to after running out of Hulk buster (and similar) armours to do in this price bracket.
My only issues are the same as everyone else has stated. The helmet is an odd shape because it's designed to pull double duty as shoulder pads, and mounting those forces the arms to be mounted too low. As a consequence, the arms are too short so they don't hand too low. And there's an annoying consistency in Lego placing shoulders too low, both the Iron Monger and the comic Hulkbuster were considerably improved by moving the shoulderline up to where it should be.
Being lego, I've extended the arms and pulled the shoulders a stud. I couldn't come up with an acceptable way to use the specialised shoulderpads, so I ditched them in favour of an inaccurate build that still covers and bulks up the joint.
Also, a light brick with a cooler colour is needed. Red and orange are fine and dandy, until a set needs a bluer shade and passing an orange light through a single blue brick basically makes no difference. It's a worthy addition to the resource pool, let's get some more LED colours.
Is it me, or is it a Bionicle with Ironman colors???
I would’ve preferred a Specialized Armors set featuring Deep Sea Armor and Space Armor accompanied by alcoves that connect with the armory and/or hall of armor. Throw in U and DUM-E and they’d have had my money day one.
This is okay but has no place in my collection, unfortunately.
I like it for parts (got 2 already) but it looks pretty underwhelming.
I think the pictures you posed him in look good
Doesn't appear the design of the figures has got any better since they quietly (but rightly) binned off the Star Wars line.
And as an aside are the summary boxes going to to stay at the start of the reviews even though most people seemed to think they'd be better at the end?
Is there a reason they’ve never done a plain white light brick?
You’d think it would be the only colour they’d need to make, and then the light can be filtered through a coloured transparent brick in front of the light brick.
No, thanks!
Tempting to re-colour this as a War Machine. I welcome any suggestions for a silver or grey faceplate
Lego should have learned their lesson with the SW buildable figures and just stop.
I like this. It really goes to show how far System shaping and detailing have come to have an articulated model that's as lean and streamlined as this.
As someone who doesn't really collect Super Heroes I probably won't get this, but as a general constraction fan I hope Lego might continue to experiment in this direction. With only one new mold this is already very promising and could become even more so with investment in ones that can improve areas on this that are clearly doing the best they can with what's available currently.
I'm hoping it sells somewhat well so they make more and so that buildable figures will continue to exist in some way, but I do not like this model at all. The arms are attached way too low (they should've attached the arms at shoulder level and have the shoulder pads still be articulated but attached to the arms), the head looks blocky and the neck looks terrible.
CCBS is so much better than this, it gets the job done with way less pieces and results in a figure that is about the same size but much more organic looking, much more poseable and a bit cheaper.
Just to keep balance in the universe, I hope the summary boxes stay at the beginning, which is where I, and my kids, prefer it.
Thx!
This reminds me a little too much of the stained glass knight from the film Young Sherlock Holmes and is to me a bit... knightmarish.
"Unfortunately, such consistency extends to incorrect information which routinely appears on similar plaques"
May just be my favourite line in a review ever.
This looks sooo awful.
Not a fan of this at all, I just don't see the point, it lacks enough playability to be a toy, and doesn't have the detail or design to be a model. I think they are trying to do both but end up with neither.