The Lego Star Wars set 40268: R3-M2 is one of the 11 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story sets released in early 2017 (January 2017 in Europe/ January 2017 in the US-of-A). It contains 21 parts and 1 minifigures and should only be offered as a promotional set for Lego Star Wars purchases of 25$ and above (at least in my country - Romania). Looking around on eBay for some information on the pricing, I came across some people selling them for about 25$/ 21GBP/ 24EUR, bringing the cents-per-piece ratio to about 119c/ 100p / 114c (or 1.19$/ 1GBP/ 1.14EUR). I had no intention to buy this set whatsoever, but it was offered to me upon purchasing some other sets. It is a great opportunity to write a review, I guess...
Disclaimer note: I have bought this set with my own money from the local store, paying full price. The Lego Group had no entanglements with the way I aquiered this set and is probably unaware of my existence anyhow. The opinions here are therefore my own; they are not reviewed before being posted here by anyone else but myself.
Disclaimer note: I have bought this set with my own money from the local store, paying full price. The Lego Group had no entanglements with the way I aquiered this set and is probably unaware of my existence anyhow. The opinions here are therefore my own; they are not reviewed before being posted here by anyone else but myself.
Box, Instructions, Out-of-the-box and building experience
To state the obvious, this set does not come in a box, but in a polybag. What's interesting is the choice of plastic for the main bag: it is some sort of soft plastic, that is very elastic, unlike, for instance the numbered bags that you will find is larger sets.
After looking for half an hour for some scissors, I finally managed to cut the bag and get building... but all I encountered was another plastic bag containing the parts I was going to need, a 10-step instruction pamphlet, a sticker sheet with a single sticker on it, a plastic card that acts as a background for the stand you have to build.
Obviously the build is unexciting... There are only 21 parts in this set... What would you expect?! You also get 2 spare parts. 
Minifigures and accessories
This set only contains 1 minifig, an astromech droid, a R3-M2 unit. It is made up of 4 parts: the head, the body and the two legs. Only the body and the head are printed. The print on the former is almost the same as that of R2-D2, only the colors differ (while R2-D2 has a white-and-blue print, this one has a white-and-brown one). I appreciate the attention to detail here.
The head is a final 2x2 brick painted transparent brown, with the typical astromech print, only in brown.
The head is a final 2x2 brick painted transparent brown, with the typical astromech print, only in brown.
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| You can barely see it, even in real life, but it's there |
The completed model
This is just a minifigure-stand on steroids, because of the name-tag and the background-card. I noticed that there are some pinholes on the sides of the stand, so I assume that this set is part of a larger collection of similar sets that connect to each other and look nice on display. Speaking of display, the print on the background-card is odd: I honestly can't make out what is depicted (I don't mean the large "LEGO STAR WARS" text). It might be a hangar... maybe a space station... Sure, you are not going to see most of it anyway (because the droid is in the way), but something more detailed would have been nice.
I find the way the card is attached to the stand to be very interesting and original.
Overall
Well, I'll make this section as short as possible: you should not spend your money on this set, unless you really are into collecting all of the droids in the Lego Star Wars universe. There are no interesting parts to make it an interesting purchase as a parts set and we have seen a lot of astromechs over the years. Sure, "this one is different", you might say... but 25$ is a tough sell only for a minifigure. If you get this set, like I did, as a gift for your purchase, you might be better off selling it for 10-20$ later, to make up some spent money, than keeping it around.
P.S.:Upon further research about this set, I came across an article on Brickset.com that argued the lack of any official information about this set. It seems that this set has only been offered in Romania at a mono-brand-store-chain (I happen to live a couple blocks away from one of them). I don't know if it will be released anywhere else. I also found the receipt I received when I got this polybag. You can clearly see that set 40268 is labeled "Confidential"...
P.S.:Upon further research about this set, I came across an article on Brickset.com that argued the lack of any official information about this set. It seems that this set has only been offered in Romania at a mono-brand-store-chain (I happen to live a couple blocks away from one of them). I don't know if it will be released anywhere else. I also found the receipt I received when I got this polybag. You can clearly see that set 40268 is labeled "Confidential"...
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