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Your mileage may vary with sets of kits that can combine into a superbuild: sometimes the individual sets are better than the combined; sometimes it's the reverse. This particular set would be the latter IMO, the only small set I liked enough to get an extra of for its own sake was the helicopter (I'm a sucker for brick-built gunships).
This aircraft carrier was a real joy to build, took me an afternoon but I had an especially long shift that saturday so it worked out great. Other than the ski-ramp piece this set could be easily built with real Legos; I'm already planning to make a counterpart someday with a fully flush flight deck.
The build itself is nicely detailed and even has play features: a pair of flight deck elevators, one on each side of the "island" that actually lead down to open hangar areas below. A downside to these is the slightly lesser quality of Sluban parts means the elevator platforms and their connections to the ship are a bit fragile.
The most challenging aspect of the build was applying the stickers and my perfectionism kicked into overdrive in that area. I'm still unsatisfied with the windows stickers on the "island", probably would've turned out better if I'd cut them up a bit but by that point I was ready to just have this thing finished. An interesting aspect of the stickers was there were instructions for Chinese, "English" and Russian markings with appropriate stickers for the bows of the ship. I didn't apply any of them at the time, might pick one at some later date.
I have hopes to build an entire escort fleet for the Malkin (named for Evgeni Malkin because frickin' Malkin), and an opposing fleet with its own carrier. We'll see though how far I get on all that, also want to make some more and better aircraft for it.
