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Blacktron Renegade

The 80s space villains are back, and this remake really understands why you loved them.

Brick Rated Score

4.1/5

Set 10355 · 2025

Pieces1,151

Minifigs3

Year2025

Set number10355

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The verdict

If you grew up wanting the Blacktron guys to win, this one is going to hit you right in the nostalgia.

It's a faithful, playable, sticker-free love letter to the 1987 original, blown up to about 1.5 times the size with a genuinely clever dropship function. The catch is that it's a niche set with a lot of yellow, so if you have no history with Blacktron you might just see a busy black-and-yellow spaceship. For the people it's for, though, it's a joy.

Best for: 80s Classic Space kids who wanted the villains to win

The full review

What it is

Blacktron were the first proper villains LEGO ever gave the Space theme, and if you were a kid in 1987 you already know the feeling this LEGO® set is chasing. The Renegade was the flagship of that faction, all black and yellow and gloriously up to no good, and 10355 brings it back at roughly one and a half times the original size. What I love is that the designer, Jae Won Lee, didn't just scale it up and call it done. He kept the iconic asymmetrical silhouette, the aggressive angles, the sense that this thing is built to raid something, and then packed it with the kind of playability the 1987 kids could only dream about. This was his first set since joining LEGO in early 2023, and it's a confident debut.

The catch

The build itself runs about an hour and a half and comes in two booklets, so you can build it with someone else if you like. You start small with the rover and the little droid before moving onto the main ship, and the flow is easy and enjoyable rather than technically demanding. It doesn't have the engineering finesse of something like the Galaxy Explorer, and it won't test you the way a big Technic build would, but that's not really the point here. The point is the payoff, and the star of the show is the dropship mechanism. A Technic-activated function releases the rover straight out of the ship's middle section, and honestly it's the kind of thing that would have caused a playground riot in 1987. There's landing gear for display, a removable comms module, a two-pilot cockpit, and enough modular reconfiguring to keep a kid busy for ages.

Who it's for

I'll be straight with you about the downsides. The most common complaint, and I agree with it, is that there's simply too much yellow. In the original, yellow worked as a menacing accent against all that black. Here the middle section leans so hard into it that the ship reads as busy instead of sinister, and a triangular logo flap looks a little odd next to the clean slope the old version used. The value is fine rather than generous too, sitting a touch above the usual Icons rate per gram, so you are paying a small nostalgia premium. Here's who should grab it: anyone who had Blacktron as a kid, anyone who loves 80s Classic Space, and anyone who just wants a fun, swooshable ship with real play built in. Who should skip it: if the name Blacktron means nothing to you and you want pure display-piece elegance, your money stretches further elsewhere. But if this thing already made you smile, trust that feeling. It delivers.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

The build is paced kindly. You warm up on the rover and the support droid, then settle into the main ship, and there's a nice rhythm to it as the asymmetrical body takes shape around you. It's more about clever assembly and play integration than white-knuckle technique, so it's a relaxing sit-down rather than a puzzle. The dropship section is where the interesting construction lives, since you're building a release mechanism into the belly of the ship, and watching it click together and actually work is the highlight of the whole thing.

For parts people there's real interest here. There's a brand new mold, an inverted 45 degree 6x8 double slope with pin holes on the sides and a cutout center, in black, basically two inverted slopes fused with Technic mounting built in. The prints are the real treat though, with zero stickers in the box: a hexagonal Blacktron flag, two slopes carrying astronaut intercom and control panel art, and two tiles with arrow and console graphics in black and yellow. That console print genuinely looks crisper than the 1987 version. Recolor hunters get a trans-yellow windscreen (seen in only a couple of other sets), yellow triangular road signs making their first new appearance since 2012, plus yellow wheels and inverted slopes and a fresh dark bluish gray curved brick. Add trans-red radar dishes that barely show up anywhere, and it's a surprisingly rich pick-and-mix for MOC builders.

Fun facts

01Blacktron was LEGO's very first villainous Space faction, introduced in 1987, and this is a scaled-up remake of the original 6954 Renegade from that same year.
02The little corrupted support robot has a backstory hidden in the manual: it's canonically been taken from the 1987 Solar Power Transporter set.
03The manual name-drops the Futuron faction, hinting the energy pods have enough juice to reach Futuron quadrants, which fans read as a wink toward possible future Classic Space remakes.
04The new version is roughly 1.5 times the size of the 1987 original and ships completely sticker-free, using printed elements throughout.