Vonado Review · Purchased February 11, 2024 · $427.99 CAD via Vonado
Some of the best entries in a compatible-brick catalogue exist specifically because the official license holder never got around to making them.
The Background
LEGO has released exactly one officially licensed Horizon product: the Forbidden West Tallneck set (76989), a mid-size build that came out to solid reviews but left an obvious gap for fans of the game’s other, more aggressive machines. There has never been an official LEGO Thunderjaw or any similarly named “Thunder Claw” set. What I bought is a fan (MOC) design manufactured and sold as a compatible kit through Vonado, filling a hole in the official catalogue that LEGO itself has simply never addressed.
This arrived as part of the same large February order as the Star Wars sets earlier in this series, and at $427.99 it represented a real step up in both price and ambition from those smaller builds.
Living With It
Machine-creature builds like this live or die on articulation, and this is where the set earns its price tag. The legs, head, and tail all have genuine poseable joints rather than being fixed in one aggressive dinosaur-esque stance, which meant I could actually pose it in a way that matched reference art from the game rather than settling for whatever the instructions defaulted to. Getting that kind of mechanical complexity right, with joints that hold their pose under the model’s own weight instead of drooping, is a genuinely harder engineering problem than a static ship or building, and it shows in both the piece count and the build time, which ran closer to a full weekend than a single evening.
The tradeoff for all of that is durability handling: with this many articulated joints, this is not a set you want younger hands or a curious pet handling roughly, since the connection points that allow posing are inherently a little less rigid than a fully fixed structure would be.
What I Liked
- Fills a real gap, there is no official LEGO equivalent at this scale or price
- Genuinely impressive articulation and poseability for a brick-built creature
- Shell and plating detail translates the source game’s design language well
- A satisfying weekend-length build rather than a quick evening project
What I Didn’t
- Poseable joints mean less structural rigidity than a fixed-position build
- Not something to display somewhere it might get bumped or handled roughly
- A meaningful price jump from the smaller sets earlier in the same order
The Value Verdict
Rating: 4/5
For a Horizon fan, this is close to essential specifically because nobody else has made it. LEGO’s own catalogue leaves this exact machine on the table, and Vonado’s version fills that gap with a genuinely well-engineered build. Just budget real assembly time and a stable shelf for it once it is done.
The Compulsive Canadian Gamer 