LEGO Hero Factory 2011: Fire Lord video review

Here's my video review covering the parts & build of Fire Lord, LEGO set #2235 from the early 2011 Hero Factory villains series.

For a bigger view see the Hero Factory Fire Lord review directly on YouTube.

It's a little tough to get past the new building style that's so dependent on ball joints all around.  If you look beyond that or are happy with it, then Fire Lord is an okay-looking villain set except for the upper legs, which completely and utterly ruin the appearance for me.  The thinness of them is disconcerting to begin with. The fact that the parts are completely exposed looks sloppy and unfinished.  The fact that the main upper leg parts are also screaming bright orange, a color you don't otherwise see from the front of this set, blows me away (in a bad way).

I'm also not so happy with just how many different colors and shades were included in this Fire Lord.  You get yellow, Furno blade orange, screaming bright orange, and bright red, including yellow/red mixes in the fire exhaust, zamor/meteor sphere, and the melting rock prints on some of the armor pieces.  In the gray spectrum, you have bright silver, dark pearl gray, and black.  That's a lot of colors, and they're distributed pretty evenly all around.

In all, the parts are very intriguing and a few of them are downright amazing, but the completed set looks like a joke, almost a really bad MOC made by someone who only has a handful of completely random parts.  The feet look insultingly unfinished and nonsensical to me as well, and the side-to-side leg articulation is very limited and impractical.

Sorry LEGO, I do not like this one.  Lots of great parts in this set, but as a correctly-built set, it's a mess.