Do you get Bakugan? I confess I knew little about them before this toy arrived on our doorstep in our last Toyologist parcel. I'm not sure I know much more, even now.
Apparently, there's an anime series that runs alongside it, but the game was released a good year beforehand. Fair enough. I looked into how to play the game and found this on Wikipedia. That clears it up, doesn't it? Erm, no. There's also a whole Wiki devoted to it: 82,000 pages and counting. Always a worrying sign, I feel. Not your average kids' game.
Monkey was keen to give this a go. In the box are six different "traps" that you can use to play the game and they connect up to the Bakugan to make the Dragonoid. The traps are rolled onto the gate card and transform into action figures. There is only one gate card, as well as one ability card (which affects various things; yep, don't understand that bit either). This limits the amount you can play the game unless you already have other Bakugan sets. Monkey enjoyed clipping the parts together to make "the robot" . Beyond that, there wasn't much more for him to do with it beyond taking it apart again and rolling the traps onto the gate card. Monkey doesn't really grasp the concept of the game, and to be honest, neither did we - but without more equipment, we can't fully try that out.
The pieces are pretty solid and I would imagine this is why it costs £39.99. I think that's quite expensive, especially as you cannot play the game without other pieces. It's suitable from 5 years old, but I suspect older children will get more out of this than a 5 year old as they can learn how to play the game.
I think this could be better value. It needs pieces from other sets (a Bakugan starter pack, for example, costs around £12) to make full use of it. Although Monkey enjoyed it, I think it could either be more straightforward for his age, or merely aimed at a slightly older market.
Oh, and if you know how to play the Bakugan game, could you spare an hour teaching us?
(I was provided with this toy to review and have received no other compensation. The opinions stated here are my own, and have not been influenced by the aforementioned compensation.)
Great review - I was considering buying one of these for my eight year old nephew and now understand he does need the starter packs and add ons - thank you.
ReplyDeleteNice toys review. I love to play with attacking toys as like as Bakugan that I recently collected from at PIJ. Now I also wanna to collect your posted Bakugan Anime DVD from there. Thanks for your nice toys review.
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