The Inventor series manages to do something that has never been done before. It puts motorized bricks in affordable kid-friendly form. Prior to this, they had pretty much been exclusive to the classic TECHNIC® sets and the MINDSTORMS™ sets, neither of which were really aimed at the younger crowd. The few exceptions were the MANAS and the new SPYBOTICS™ sets, but with price tags ranging from $60-100, they’re a bit beyond the average allowance, and somewhat specialized at that. While the two less expensive sets rely purely on mechanical motion, the two motorized ones still are less abusive to the pocket and provide more standardized motors.

Additionally, for the BIONICLE™ fans, the $40 Motor Movers comes with at least four trans-grey BOHROK eyes, and the $25 Wild Wind-Up comes with at least one black GALI hook. In both cases this is the first time those pieces have been released.

In a trend first stared with the Star Wars line, we continue to see that less is more. In this case, it consists of tiny little vehicles made with three different Designer Sets. With instructions on how to build 34-38 vehicles each, the red set focuses primarily on basic land vehicles, the yellow set covers mainly construction equipement (though there is a yellow taxi thrown in), and the white/blue group is avionics.

Also in the Designer line are two sets that focus on robots. The Mini Robots group are primarily under 6″ tall and feature a wide variety of color, while the Robobots range up to a foot in height and are basically just blue with orange accents. On the more natural side of things are the Wild Collection and Little Creations, with instructions for 64 brown/blue/green/red animals and 17 blue/orange/yellow animals respectively.

And really getting back to the true roots of The LEGO® Company are the Creator sets, which, from what I was told, don’t really come with any instructions at all, and very few specialized pieces. These two sets are all about basic bricks and raw imagination, just like the sets that were around when I was really, really young.