Been trying out Lego alternatives the past few weeks. Mixed feelings.
The first was the Parthenon by Xingbao
The model itself looks superb, and it's all prints. You can also take off the roof and look at the inner decorations. Very affordable too for how many pieces you get (~1600). That's it for the positives.
On the negative side:
All tiles are scratched. It's like they scooped them off of the dirty floor before packaging them up lmao
If I turned over the model, quite a few roof pieces would just fall down. A brick should stick, but that's clearly not a given here.
The construction is wrong; the inner pillars are too short. I also couldn't get the roof to rest properly on the building, so it's lifted up a bit on one side. It was quite challenging to build, so I'm not sure if that's on me tho.
Also, those pillars... holy shit... the force required to stick them together.. the hole was neither centered nor large enough for the bottom studs to actually fit. What a pain
Then I bought some Cobi tanks
No complaints basically. Affordable, nice quality. All around some great models. I mean they cheat a little, since they have lots of special pieces. You would never get them curves, slopes and details with standard pieces lol
All prints as well. They're especially nutty about this, printing stuff like camouflage across multiple bricks if need be.
And now I'm building what Bluebrixx call the "Dome Church" (well it's the Cologne Cathedral, let's be real). It has like a million pieces (i.e. just short of 4000), but the model itself is quite small
I can already feel that it's gonna be a problem, since some pieces have started to exhibit the same flaws as those from Xingbao. The quality isn't really there.
You're building super complex advanced models with subpar bricks.
I'd still like to buy more from them, especially from their Castle line, but some of their models have been oos for months..
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