I've become a little obsessed with Lego's Smart Bricks and Star Wars Day is the perfect excuse to load up

Lego Star Wars Luke's Red Five X-Wing
(Image credit: Lego)
Lego Luke's Red Five X-Wing
Lego Luke's Red Five X-Wing: $89.97 at Amazon

If you're just getting one set, this is the Smart Play set to get because it comes with a huge variety of different elements to play with and a bunch of tiles and minifigs, too. You do only get a single Smart Brick, though, but with a repair cart, a turbo lazer turret and Leia's tracking station, each with a Smart Tile, there's a lot to love about this set. I've had a blast taking tiles out of these and putting them into non-Smart Play models to add another element to my own builds.

Lego Darth Vader's TIE Fighter
Lego Darth Vader's TIE Fighter: $69.97 at Amazon

There's not as much to the TIE Fighter set in terms of extras as with the X-Wing, but it does make a great complementary set. Each reacts to the other's blaster fire, making living room dog fights come alive. Though it's worth remembering there are no volume controls... The TIE Fighter is more effective as a model than the X-Wing, however, and the sounds of Darth Vader spinning off into the void is a true joy when the accelerometer kicks in, as is the Imperial March when he takes his seat.

And there's something super charming about the way that means it's not super precise in terms of the audio. It's like the old Star Wars games on an 8-bit computer, where the John Williams' scores are recognizable and the characters' speech is an approximation not a replication.

I will say these sets aren't necessarily for the adult aficionado looking for anything in terms of precision from the models either. The needs of accessibility means the Smart Bricks always have to be easily removed from the model for charging, and need to be close to their compatible minifigs, too. That makes the likes of the TIE Fighter and X-Wing more simple than the more realistic sets in the theme.

But they're a hell of a lot of fun to play with, and each of the sets comes with multiple tiles and extra little details that only add to the play. The ships each have blaster functions that react to each other, so while the boys and I are chasing each other around we can keep shooting the other down, and the bricks react to color so we can use green hammers to fix them and blue hoses to refuel them, also part of the sets.

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Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

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