LEGO Star Wars 75393 TIE Fighter & X-Wing Mash-up review

Another X-wing, another TIE Fighter, so what? Well, these two have something a little different under the hood – and we’re not just talking about those interchangeable wings…

The LEGO Star Wars team has found a brand new way to repackage its greatest hits in 2024, bringing us fresh takes on the Millennium Falcon, X-wing, TIE Fighter and perhaps one other ship we can’t talk about right now, all with their own gimmick for the upcoming Disney+ special Rebuild the Galaxy. 75393 TIE Fighter & X-Wing Mash-up introduces the concept of Uglies to the LEGO Star Wars line, but that’s not why you’ll want to bump this surprisingly solid set up your shopping list.

Release: August 1, 2024 Price: £94.99 / $109.99 / €109.99 Pieces: 1,063 Minifigures: 5 LEGO: Order now

Haven’t we been here before?

If you’ve already got an X-wing and a TIE Fighter in your LEGO Star Wars collection, the only question this review needs to answer is this: is it worth upgrading to these two? And the short answer is no, unless your original trilogy X-wing and TIE Fighter happen to be pre-2018 models, in which case it’s definitely time to take the plunge. But they aren’t enough of a departure from the versions we’ve seen since then to justify splashing the cash this time round.

What they do instead is iterate on the 2021 versions of these ships – for more compact and affordable fighters – to give us, in some ways, our best minifigure-scale LEGO X-wing and TIE Fighter to date. That’s a bold claim, and one that would usually be hooked to a recommendation to upgrade at all costs, so why the hesitation here? Well, there’s only so far you can take these ships within this footprint. And while these might just be the best versions of these vehicles at this budget yet, the minor design tweaks are just that: minor.

Let’s start with the X-wing, because it’s genuinely really good, improving on its predecessors in two substantial ways. First, it finally pulls off the hexagonal nose last seen in the very first LEGO X-wing, but achieved much better here with a mix of 1×2 slopes – several in dark red, because this isn’t Red Five’s X-wing, but a totally new version from Rebuild the Galaxy, which has given the LEGO Group licence to play around with the colour scheme a bit. (But only a bit, especially compared to 75389 The Dark Falcon.)

Second, this X-wing finally makes the effort to include the rear landing gear, which means that you can display it on a shelf with the S-foils in attack position. That was previously not possible because the wings would simply close when the ship was rested on a table. But the designer’s hand has been forced to a degree here by 75393 TIE Fighter & X-Wing Mash-up’s central gimmick, which we’ll come to in just a little while.

Something old, something new, something borrowed… from a bomber

Next up, the TIE Fighter, which takes an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach to the wings of 2021’s 75300 Imperial TIE Fighter, recreated here almost one-for-one. Bigger changes come to the cockpit, a part of Star Wars engineering that has long plagued the LEGO Group, because how do you satisfyingly build a ball with angular bricks? The answer here is to borrow 75347 TIE Bomber’s 3×3 arched elements, only now cleverly setting the 4×4 windscreen element flush, for a design that works pretty well from the front and back.

It’s perhaps not quite as successful from the top, especially given it’s shorter than it is wide, and the hinge for the windscreen cuts into what was previously an unbroken printed dish – and is here instead three stickers on sloped pieces, which for some reason don’t really seem to line up. You also have to accept that, as with the TIE Bomber, the pilot here has absolutely zero visibility. Oh, and the ammo for the spring-loaded shooters sticking out the back is a bit comical, but that’s an easy fix.

Those niggles aside, this is easily the second-best TIE Fighter behind the still unmatched 2018 version, but at a more acceptable price tag (relatively speaking) and a size that’s easier to both display and play with. (And that includes swooshing it around your LEGO room. Don’t pretend you won’t.)

TIE-Ship-Wing-X-Fighter-Thing

That brings us neatly to the core concept of 75393 TIE Fighter & X-Wing Mash-up, which is that mash-up bit in the set name. The wings on both of these ships can be popped off and switched around, inspired at least partly by a trend in the LEGO Star Wars community a few years ago, and as a play feature it’s not only novel but effortless.

Each wing pops into place using a Technic pin and hole connection, and is then locked in situ using a cross-axle that slides through a plate with holes and a 2×2 brick with an axle hole and Technic pin. It’s one of at least 10 possibilities the set’s designer conjured up when figuring out the most efficient way to incorporate interchangeable wings, and it’s difficult to think of a better solution – not least because it doesn’t really get in the way of what the set is otherwise trying to do.

In fact, what’s really neat about 75393 TIE Fighter & X-Wing Mash-up is that while it might be centred around its TIE Wing and X-Fighter gimmick, it manages to deliver on that play feature with minimal compromises to its aesthetics. These still look like an X-wing and TIE Fighter, so you can ignore the wing-swapping altogether without any real interruption to the models themselves. The only major bugbear is in the axles that lock the wings in place, which for the sake of accessibility jut out just far enough to be noticeable. If you aren’t bothered about switching the wings, all you need to do is sub in a shorter axle.

There’s just one other compromise here to allow for the interchangeable S-foils and solar panels, and it’s that the X-wing has completely dropped the longstanding mechanism that allows its wings to open simultaneously. Instead, they’re all attached using click hinges that must be operated independently. But there was no way to keep that functionality, traditionally powered by elastic bands, when the wings need to pop off. And the trade-off is the additional landing gear, ostensibly included to allow the X-Fighter to stand on its own two feet, but also perfect for displaying your X-wing with its S-foils deployed.

We’ve spoken much less about the minifigures in 75393 TIE Fighter & X-Wing Mash-up than you might traditionally have expected for a LEGO Star Wars review, and it’s with good reason: these are really nothing to write home about without any context, and we won’t get that until Rebuild the Galaxy drops on September 13. As is, the most appealing part of the line-up is easily L3-G0, decked out in traditional LEGO colours (which are uncomfortably close to McDonald’s colours, it turns out).

But without a killer minifigure selection to do at least some of the heavy lifting, that £95 price tag begins to look a little bit suspect. The 2021 versions of these ships together came to £85 following inflationary increases, with seven minifigures total, and it’s really not obvious where that extra £10 is going here. As always, best practice is to wait for a discount – but you won’t need a massive one to enjoy 75393 TIE Fighter & X-Wing Mash-up.

This set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.

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Our honest opinion: Fresh upgrades to both these ships make this an easy recommendation if you don’t yet own an X-wing or TIE Fighter, but the minifigures and price tag make it difficult to justify upgrading from the 2021 versions.