The Rocket Racer set (6491) is a LEGO Time Cruisers set which came out in 1996. It comes with 1 minifig and 58 pieces. This set does include no decals and there're no mistakes in the instructions and no missing pieces.

Minifigures:

Timmy: Timmy has a blue cap and blue pants. He also comes with white arms and a green shirt which has a big red 'T' on it. Timmy has black hair, a nose and big eyes. He also has a few freckles on his face.

Rocket Racer:

The rocket racer is very nicely done. There're two lasers on each side and it drives on 3 tyres. If you move it forwards and backwards, the propellers on the top turn a full 360°. On the back you can also see some fire pieces from the engine. It's a very nice addition to any LEGO collection!

Positive:

Great pieces which you can use for brickfilms or MOC's
Nice starter set
Price
Minifigure


Negative:

Stickers
Not so many play features

All in all, it's a great set to get, and I would highly recommend you to get this model. You can find this set on eBay, BrickLink and Amazon for sure. Here is the link where you can check out the full gallery I made for this set on my website: www.klokriecher.de

Videos I made of this set:

Stopmotion

Review

Speed Build

This set is very fun like all of the other time cruiser sets. The mini propelers spin but not when moving fast.

Pros

Moving propelers.

Cons

None.

This is the smallest of the Time Cruisers set, and despite its size, it still manages to build in the feature that something moves when the vehicled is pushed along the ground. In this case, the wheels turn the propellers on the top back of the vehicle.

Overall, the vehicle looks more like a 3-wheeled cart than a racer or scooter. The yellow engine bits with lights makes the vehicle looks rather weird. There's also a missing windscreen on the vehicle. At the rear, the flames shooting out seems a bit too cliche.

Design-wise the vehicle is sturdy, but the colours seem blocky and uninspiring. The lack of the windscreen above gives it negative points, although the use of joysticks instead of a wheel is a good touch.

I love the idea of Time Cruisers - a little kid and a doctor travelling through time to stop the villains, the Time Twisters, from doing...something...with time. Maybe twisting time, however that works? The sets are absolutely fever dreams of design though, with multiple moving functions and every spare part Lego had lying around pushing into a single line of sets. It seems like Lego was trying to find a way to get rid of every spare part they had in their factory at one time.

Now the sets, for the most part, I actually really like. I like the design of Flying Time Cruiser using the boat hull and odd flying wings, and I had quite a good time building and reviewing the Whirling Time Warper craft with its multitude of play functions.

But this set, the 6491 Rocket Racer, is just a little odd. It's the small set, the little box you would see next to the medium and large ones, possibly an impulse buy or a stocking filler. It would have been something that I might have been given as we could never really afford the bigger sets.

Building Experience

I didn't find the Rocket Racer to be particularly complex to build at all. You've got a centralised chassis piece, and the whole build is bottom to top. The only bit which might cause some confusion is the insertion of the yellow fan pieces, which are the main "play" function, as the tolerances and spacing needs to be right for it to spin correctly.

Once completed, it's underwhelming. The whole set is just grey all over. Grey and black and grey again. The accents of yellow and red just don't break it up enough, and it ends up looking visually uninteresting with nothing to really break up the visual image of the build. I feel this could be improved by replacing some parts with more colourful ones, but that's besides the point. In addition, the shaping on the Rocket Racer is pretty ordinary with a massive blocky tower just heaped up at the back of the build. It looks incredibly amateur just having all that stuff piled up in a block like that.

On top of that, I find Lego's use of "flames" to mark speed and exhaust to be very ordinary. They did this so often on cars and such and I found that it never looked good or conveyed speed in any way, shape or form. The flames are cool, just overused.

Parts

The parts for Rocket Racer are interesting enough, and will easily find use somewhere else in your sets and parts bin. The two little yellow booster things are always cool to have, and the transparent orange flames are always cool to have for fires and such. And for such a small set, you do get wheels, propellers, technic bars, boosters, etc.

Timmy is a cool little minifigue, and his freckled face is great to use in your own sets. The torso is also generic enough to see use in city and town layouts. He's also one of a few minifigures I can think of with a nose. But that being said, it's the same Timmy that always appears in the Time Cruisers line - nothing special about him here.

Playability

The play function here is kind of cool, I'll give Lego that. When you push the Rocket Racer along the ground, the propellers on the top spin by virtue of the wheels pushing the little red and black bits that hang down from the propellers. It's pretty neat to see in action but I'm not entirely sure why it's on the top of the set as you think with the name being Rocket Racer, it would be on the back to help the whole racing thing.

Unfortunately, I think Timmy has drawn the short end of the straw. He doesn't get any accessories, weapons, tools or the like. He doesn't have anywhere to store items nor does he have the ability to store items with no hooks or brackets. He doesn't really have the space to bring stuff with him back in time, which is a shame because that was a huge part of Time Cruisers, the whole costume and dress-up aspect of going back in time which can be seen in the Flying Time Vessel and the Hypno-Cruiser.

Usually, when I see a set like a car or a helicopter or plane, I know that a kid could definitely find new story uses for it but with this...I don't know. It just looks so bizarre and is so small that it hits a bit of a imagination dead end almost immediately. Aside from being a cool car or a small helicopter, I just don't know what a kid could make with this. It's a pile of blocks on wheels. It's just got nothing about that really screams "time travel". It doesn't have any cool panels or tiles with displays or anything, or a storage compartment to keep stuff. The movement function is cool, but that's hardly enough.

Value for Money

This is one of those sets that gets overinflated every time I see it on eBay, simply because the seller thinks that due to it being a "lesser known" line, that somehow warrants it being sold at unbelievable prices. Currently, as of writing this review (27 May 2020), there are a number of listings here for this little set in Australia:

• $30.00 plus $10.00 postage.
• $20.00 plus 8.95 postage
• $12.50 plus $8.50 postage

This is absolutely ridiculous. I would barely pay $10 dollars for this set, maybe $12 at a stretch. Just because something is "vintage" doesn't mean it's worth a lot - there are lots of old Lego sets which are, when you really look at them, pretty ordinary. There's no specialised pieces here in this set, there's no rare piece or print. Timmy appears in a few other sets so he's not exclusive to this little thing here. Similarly, just because you have the instructions, doesn't mean it's worth infinitely more.

If you're wondering "Well, what should I pay for it?", I'd say $10 at most. You can easily buy the parts for this set on Bricklink and if you see it in a bulk listing, it's worth considering.

Final Thoughts

This is easily the weakest set of the Time Cruisers line, offering little play and little imagination. It's sat on display now for about or month or two and it doesn't excite or engage the imagination in any way. If you want to collect Time Cruisers sets, or you want Timmy's minifigure, just get the Hypno Cruiser. There's way more parts and much more to engage you there. If you need to collect all the Time Cruisers sets, fair enough but otherwise, you can give this one a miss.