On Our Desk - 17

Lego Technic 8297 Off-roader

Manufacturer: Lego Technic
UK Price (as reviewed): £89.99 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $119.99 (exc. Tax)

There can't be many people out there that are into building PCs that don't have a soft spot for Lego Technic and the Off-roader is a textbook example of what makes this range of supposed kids toys so awesome.

The 8297 truck is very intricately designed, a quality that culminates in a feature list longer than an issue of Custom PC magazine. The off-roader boasts working pistons, active suspension to alter ground clearance, rack and pinion steering, and even a limited slip differential.

As if that wasn’t enough to satisfy your appetite for precision-engineering goodness, this model also sports an electric winch on the front bumper, LED headlights that can cut through the gloom of the darkest toy chest, pneumatic doors and an opening boot that gives enough storage for any LEGO soccer mum.


Six AA batteries are needed to operate the electric parts, but be warned that they’re not included. In true Lego Technic style, everything works together with the harmony of a collective of well-practised orchestral geniuses. Watching the complex arrays of gears move seamlessly around one another and the smooth action of the pneumatic doors is half the fun. The other half is the pain of building it.

The spring-loaded active suspension can raise the ride-height from 70mm to 90mm allowing the Off-roader to handle any kind of terrain from the Lego adventurer range to the icy wastes of the kitchen floor, or wherever else you fancy testing the 8297 against. As is the case with most Lego kits, the Off-roader has a secondary build and you can disassemble the kit to make a dune-buggy style vehicle, or whatever else you can imagine.

There are three manuals, equating to around 200 pages of instructions, and it took us around eight hours to build – which was pretty exhausting. The instructions are easy to follow for the most part, but the similarity in the colour of some parts can be confusing at times. We also got confused on several occasions thanks to a symbol that resembles the repeat symbol in iTunes but which actually means to turn around the part you’re working on at the time and not to repeat the previous step.


Sure, there are a couple of tricky bits in the build process but in the end they only serve to make the achievement all the more satisfying, a feeling that’s closely matched by finishing a PC build. Although the novelty of the on-board gadgetry will wear off in time, the Off-roader will always be able to do what it does best which is sitting on your desk looking pro.

In fact, the only real shame is that that’s all it can do – sit on your desk and look pretty. The machine powers up and you can steer it around, but not remotely. The steering column raises up through the roof and there’s no radio control, so you’ll need a hand on the hood if you want to make it move. The lack of a remote control is the biggest flaw for the Off-roader, but it’s an understandable one when you consider that you can literally disassemble the entire truck and make something new out of it at a moments notice.

Verdict: When complete the 8297 Off-roader, or ‘Kill-truck Five Billion’ as we call it, is sturdy enough to take some knocks and fun enough to keep you entertained for a few days and when the novelty runs out then you can always rip it apart and build something new! The 8297 really proves that building with Lego is as fun now as it ever was.