MT4BWY ’22 GWP Review: 30495 AT-ST Polybag

The first-of-three gift with purchase (GWP) items given away by LEGO during this year’s May The 4th Be With You promotion is the appropriately scaled mini-scale 30495 AT-ST set.

Making its first blink-or-you’ll-miss-it appearance in The Empire Strikes Back during the Battle of Hoth, the chicken walker – you can read all about the developmental history of this Imperial vehicle in our 75322 Hoth AT-ST review – didn’t even get a name until it returned in Return of the Jedi.

This set made its own debut at the start of 2022 when it could be picked up in branches of Meijer, Target and Walmart in the United States before disappearing in early February.

30495 AT-ST

Ages Pieces VIP Points Item Minifigures Value

With corner to corner printing and the screen-seen AT-ST melding into the background, the packaging for this mini-build is pretty eye-catching – even if the photographed model looks like it’s firing on the Darth Vader minifigure that has been positioned in the corner.

Carefully opening the polybag and dumping out the 78 elements – which are mostly plates and tiles – and the single sheet of instructions takes nearly as long as to build the model, so put a full 5 minutes aside if you want to preserve the packaging and take your time putting this together.

Though the cockpit is adequately sized, the elongated legs are unsettling and the feet are too rectangular, giving the model an overall derpy look.

If that’s not enough to put you off, then rotate the head – the chin plates stop the turntable from pulling off a slight sideways glance – or try to put it in a dynamic pose.

A slight improvement on the original (4486 AT-ST & Snowspeeder) and only mini-scale AT-ST prior to the release of 30495 AT-ST, this updated one would have been better released in 2020 when its source movie – The Empire Strikes Back – turned 20 years old. But then most of the recent Hoth sets that LEGO has released in the 12 months haven’t made sense either.

Included the annual May The 4th Be With You retail promotion, this 79-piece build was free with any LEGO Star Wars purchase over US$40 / CA$50 / UK£40 / EU€40 made through LEGO.com or a brand store between May 1st and 8th, it is available to buy in Australia and will no doubt return to pegs in the near future.

Entertainment Earth

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