When this set was first announced I was instantly interested. I love football, I love LEGO, so what's not to like? Well, the price for starters. Although it's a big set, at £214.99 it's a hefty investment. Then LEGO announced a significant discount down to £150 and as I was in London a week later, I decided to take the plunge and picked up a set at the Leicester Square store (some GWPs at the time didn't hurt either).

I then built the set straight away but it's taken me a while to get round to reviewing it!

As a building experience, not surprisingly it gets a bit repetitive, but I really appreciate the design used to make the table so steady and robust. It's very impressive. Putting the pitch together is also nice and then there's the 22 minifigures included. Table Football contains a multitude of diverse head and hairpieces, so you can make each of the 5-a-side teams look however you like.

The minifigures are great and being able to change them around is a lovely feature. Unfortunately, the kits are a bit basic and resemble tracksuits more than shirts and shorts. Although there is a design for the red and blue teams, a bit more detail would have been nice, and perhaps squad numbers on their backs would have been a cool feature. At least the goalkeepers have black-coloured hands to represent their gloves.

As well as the table itself, you get a set of benches for the reserve players, which features storage for all the spare heads and hairpieces underneath, and a little trophy for the teams to play for. The benches are nicely done with a transparent roof and are a welcome addition to the set.

Once built, table football works amazingly well. Thanks to Huw's review, I knew the actual game played well, and it did not disappoint. The ball moves around the pitch nicely and at good speed and the player's ability to connect with it is good. Occasionally it gets a little lost around the middle of the pitch, which requires a minor tilt of the table to rectify, but overall it's fun to play.

The table mostly stands up to the rigours of an intense table football match, although the ends of the rods used to move your players do sometimes come off. That's it though, otherwise it's very solid. The score counters are stiff, but I haven't had too much trouble moving them so far.

Overall then, you get an interesting build, cool minifigures and a fun game of football to play when completed. It's just a question of whether you feel that this will justify the outlay. If it becomes discounted again I highly recommend you go for it. Without that, the value is debatable but if you can reconcile the cost to yourself it's a great set.

When I first saw the original Ideas version of this set I thought this will be a great set, but somehow someone managed to really mess it up. The original design was so beautiful while this version looks so small and ugly. It's so small that you can't even play football with it. And they even changed the original yellow minifigs to some random flesh colored ones which is bad because minifigs are yellow because then anyone can identify with them.