This set is the largest yet in the Minecraft Theme and is the centerpiece of any Minecraft collection. For those not familiar with Minecraft, I think its important to know how this fits in and what its supposed to represent.
Villages are randomly generated structures composed of a variety of buildings (houses, shops etc), farms and roads that contain AI controlled villagers that you can trade with to buy rare items. The villages are also good sources of food from their fields. The villagers use emeralds as currency for buying and selling and the village can be attacked by AI control monsters that may wipe them out. Finding a village and protecting its villagers to allow you to trade is an important part of the game. The Iron Golem is a common creation to help protect it, and villagers can be "infected" and turned into special zombie villagers that you can try to save by turning them back with potions.
One interesting decision they designer made with this set was to represent sections of various biomes throughout the village. This set includes slices of snow, jungle, desert and the normal grass sections. This allows you to connect other minecraft sets to this central one and build out to other biomes. The entire set is modular and can be rearranged in an endless variety of ways.
I know the Minecraft sets get a bit of heat for using so many very boring old school 2x2 and 2x4 blocks, but this set does include a healthy amount of nougat colored blocks including a very large number of smooth 1x4 and 1x6 smooth tiles, 1x2 and 1x4 textured (brick profile) pieces, 2x2 jumper plates and very long 1x12 bricks along with assorted other pieces in this great color. Otherwise you get the usual Minecraft specialty pieces, printed furnaces, printed crafting boxes and the various brick built figure specialty components. There is also a treasure chest.
To start off with, the set comes with a lot of minifigures and mob builds, covering a very large variety. You get a Steve, Alex, two villagers in different prints, a zombie village (zombie with green villager mold head), regular zombie, enderman, creeper, brickbuilt iron golem, and a brick built pig and piglet. Its a nice mix, but its a huge miss to only include two actual villagers. The set really could have benefited from one to two more actual villagers, even if they were repeat prints to the existing ones. I certainly appreciate the addition of multiple monsters to represent attacks on the village that Steve and Alex (assisted by the iron golem) have to defend the villagers against, but considering there is currently no other way to get villagers, the town is simple too thinly populated for proper play or display. I hope that they release a set in the next wave that adds a building for the village and at least one or two more villagers. The rest of the figures are all standard and identical to those found in previous sets. Steve gets an iron sword and Alex a diamond pick-axe, there are no armor pieces or other weapons/tools which I also felt was a miss.
I personally like the set. Having said that, I am a big Minecraft fan and I understand that if your not, this set probably does not resonate with you at all. As a licensed theme, it is a big more expensive, but I felt like it was still in the realm of reason IF your a fan of Minecraft. I always liked the Minecraft themes because the blocky look and feel harkened back to my younger days building early Lego sets, while still letting me create custom sets that, while not highly detailed or realistic by our normal standard, are very much so when compared to thier source material in game. This makes me very happy with all the Minecraft sets, but again, I cant stress enough, if you are not familiar with and passionate about the source material, these sets probably seem very odd and pointless. I like the quantity and diversity of buildings and other structures, it gives plenty of play options and lots of space to re-enact elements of the game or display figures.
There were a few misses in the set though. The biggest was the lack of more villager minifigs. Again, I very much hope they fix this by releasing a set next wave that has more villagers and some additional structure for the village. Next, I felt the butchers shop had too plain of an interior. I also thought there was a distinct lack of torches to light all the various buildings and most of the main structures do not have clips to add torches (or to use the torches from the two street lamps). I also would have liked to see some more tools/weapons/armor options. Last of all, the bright green plates that show through to the inside of the two biggest buildings annoys me quite a bit, especially since it could have been mostly fixed with little effort.
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