LEGO Star Wars: Battle of Endor (Gift with Purchase)

2019 saw the 20th anniversary of LEGO's Star Wars line. To celebrate, TLG created a special "20th Anniversary" Star Warts line (reviewed Here, Here and Here). In addition to the standard retail sets, a handful of the sets in this line were created as polybags or as Gifts with Purchase (GWP) sets. I was fortunate enough to grab the Battle for Endor GWP back in October alongside  the new Resistance A-Wing and old BB-8 kits. 

Link to Speed Build:

 

Part 1: Main Build

Let's start with the good items:

The entire model is constructed using studs-on-side techniques. Many of the bricks used to make up the forest floor have exposed studs to allow for the small AT-AT, 'Stud'-troopers and Han and Chewie builds to attach. The shield generator is a very nice build and is readily identifiable.

   
Endor's red wood trees are represented by brown antenna for the trunk with three inverted flower bottoms for the pine needles. While I had doubts while constructing them, I think this actually accomplishes a good representation of Endor's forest. 

The AT-AT builds are adorable and awesome. Even though they're using minimal parts, the designer nailed the look of the vehicles here. The AT-AT's are also very pose-able and expressive, both while on studs and free standing. 

The 'Meh':

Two stud tall builds are used to represent the unit of storm troopers re-seizing the shield generator as well as Han Solo and Chewbacca. The troopers have a black standard stud on the bottom and a white stud with a hole through on top. Chewie uses two brown studs while Han has a brown bottom stud and black upper stud. 

While the character representations are definitely fine for this scale, they just don't impress as much as the AT-ATs builds.


Now for the bad:

Alongside the iconic red woods and ground bushes, there's a large brick built tree looming over the shield generator. This thing is UGLY. I'm not quite sure what is going on with this design, but this does not look like a red wood tree. Maybe its supposed to be a willow tree? What with the bushes poking out of the leaf pieces? I dunno...

I appreciate that the base of vignette is constructed using SNOT but there are way too many 1x1x1 bricks for my taste. While it may not show up in the final photos, there were a fair bit of the bricks that were weren't perfectly aligned. This is admittedly a minor gripe though. A more significant issue would be the fact that the 2x2 inverted slopes are molded in grey rather than green like the rest of the forest base. 

Part 2: Conclusions   
I find it hard to give conclusions to these GWP kits. Most people who end up with them will be getting  them alongside other purchases and will either display as some collector "swag" or flip them online. Another difficulty here is the fact that I did not own the 20th Anniversary Hoth Vignette GWP. 

By treating this as a normal kit I don't think this kit is a good pick-up. While the AT-ATs and shield generator building are far and away the best parts of the kit, it's just unfortunate that the rest of the build is pretty 'meh' to me. In contrast the SNOT base was not very fun to build and straighten out and the weird non-Red Wood tree is very questionable.

I do appreciate the scale of this model and that it represents and I don't regret picking this kit up. I would probably be more regretful if I had picked this up as a standalone kit.