Star Wars

Imperial Landing Craft

A deep-cut Imperial ship with lovely wings and a build that never quite takes off.

Brick Rated Score

3.2/5

Set 75221 · 2018

Pieces636

Minifigs5

Year2018

Set number75221

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The verdict

The Sentinel-class landing craft is one of those blink-and-you-miss-it ships from A New Hope, and I have a soft spot for LEGO giving the obscure Imperial hardware a moment.

The folding grey wings genuinely look the part on a shelf. But I'll be straight with you: at ninety dollars for 636 pieces the value is thin, the interior is hollow, and the build itself gets repetitive fast. It's for the Imperial collector who wants the shape, not the builder chasing a great afternoon.

Best for: Imperial diorama builders and sandtrooper army-builders who want the Sentinel silhouette

The full review

What it is

The Sentinel-class landing craft is a ship most people don't even remember seeing. It sits on the Tatooine sand for a few seconds in A New Hope while sandtroopers hunt for the droids, and that's about it. So when LEGO gave it a full retail set in 2018, my first reaction was affection. There's something charming about the company caring enough to render this angular grey wedge in brick, wings and all. And the wings really are the best part. They fold down for landing and swing out for flight, and when the model sits finished on a shelf that silhouette is unmistakably Imperial. If you love the grey hardware of the Empire, the shape alone will scratch an itch.

The catch

Here is where I have to be honest with you. This was a ninety dollar set for 636 pieces, and that math never worked in its favour. A same-era X-wing cost ten dollars less and handed you close to a hundred more parts. The interior of the craft is largely empty once you get past the cockpit, so a lot of that price is paying for air and a few large grey panels. The build itself doesn't do much to make up for it either. You spend a good stretch of it repeating the same panel construction on mirrored sides, and the clever engineering moments are few. It's the kind of build that passes the time rather than delighting you.

Who it's for

So who does this one make sense for? If you build Imperial dioramas or you're quietly stacking up sandtroopers for a Tatooine scene, the two troopers and a squad leader here are useful, and the ship gives your scene a landing vehicle you can't get anywhere else. Collectors who want every Imperial shape on the shelf will forgive the flaws for the sake of that silhouette. But if you buy sets for a satisfying build, standout new parts, or genuine value for money, none of those boxes get ticked here. It has since retired and prices on the secondary market have climbed well past retail, so grabbing one now is more of a collector decision than a play-value one.

The parts story

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

Building this one is a study in large grey panels and mirrored repetition. The core is a fairly simple wedge shape, and much of your time goes into constructing the two wing assemblies, which are near identical, so you build the same thing twice. The folding mechanism is the one moment of real satisfaction, a tidy hinge arrangement that lets the wings drop for landing and lift for flight without feeling flimsy. Beyond that, the interior stays mostly empty, and you never hit that rewarding stretch where a clever sub-build clicks into place.

For parts hunters there isn't a great deal to raid here. The palette leans heavily on light and dark bluish grey, so if you build Imperial or greebled models you'll get a healthy pile of useful slopes and panels in exactly the right tones. There are no headline new molds or rare printed elements that make this a parts-pack purchase. The minifigures are the more familiar draw, five of them including old Ben Kenobi, R2-D2, an Imperial shuttle pilot and two sandtroopers with a squad leader, though every one of them had already appeared in an earlier set, so nothing here is exclusive.

Fun facts

01This was the second time LEGO made this ship. The first was 7659 Imperial Landing Craft back in 2007, so the design got a full decade between versions.
02The Sentinel-class landing craft only became part of Star Wars canon with the 1997 Special Edition re-release of A New Hope, which added the scene of it landing on Tatooine.
03None of the five minifigures are unique to the set. The sandtrooper design first appeared in January 2018's Mos Eisley Cantina, and the pilot matches the one from Krennic's Imperial Shuttle Microfighter.
04The set retired in December 2019 after roughly sixteen months on shelves, and sealed copies have since climbed well above the original ninety dollar price.