Today we received the CHIMA dvd from Lego, it arrived with our LEGO magazines we receive at regular intervals throughout the year.

Let me begin by saying that we are an avid Lego family with thousands of sets accumulated over 30+ years of the Lego way of life, between my husband and myself and now following on in the tradition of Lego collecting with our kids (ages ranging from 5-19years).

The dvd is brilliant, the CHIMA story is explained in a spectacular movie with amazing graphics and animation, clearly LEGO has spared no expense in this area, our kids (and us) thoroughly enjoyed the movies (2 included on the dvd). So much so after our youngest had received a glowing school report and all showing high levels of achievement at school as a reward we ventured out to purchase this set among other CHIMA sets from the series after viewing the great dvd.

The "Ultimate Speedor Tournament" was first on our list and an exciting start to the collection.

Pros

• Firstly a very simple build for younger family members.
• Very easy instructions to follow as usual.
• Lots of fun to play with and challenging enough for all ages
• A nice range of bricks and great action play.

Cons

• Speedorz do not look like the ones in the dvd or cartoon / story merchandising.
• Several of the characters have very little resemblance to the design used in the dvd.
• Very little effort to liaise between design and build team.
• None of the vehicles we purchased even come close to being accurate to the versions on the dvd, or in the stories including the Command Ship set 70006.

All in all a fun set, let down greatly by the design of the speedorz, as they bear very little resemblance to the actual speedorz used in the promotional dvd or their promotional advertising and stories. A small gripe to begin with but at the toy shop we struggled to match the dvd and magazine designs of the vehicles with the actual sets on display.

The fact that the speedorz didn't resemble the actual speedorz in any of LEGO's promotional material was a minor gripe until we looked at the other vehicles in the range.

Not one vehicle we purchased came close to the images on the merchandising stories or dvd.

Our expectations of another exciting range from lego has been let down by the inaccuracies of the final build product and the design/animation team. Given the prices we're expected to pay I don't think it would've taken much more effort to design more accurate models for game play.

If you are a purest and like your LEGO models to accurately resemble the original design then I suggest the CHIMA series will irritate you to bits. However as a stand alone set it was OK but not up to the usual excellence of LEGO.