This is an overdue review, and I've got more, too. But I want to start with this one.
Kre-O Transformers Battle Changers
In short: Avoid like the plague
If you were like me, you saw these when Hasbro announced them and thought they were underwhelming, but would pick them up anyway. Kre-O Transformers that transform without rebuilding. They were supposed to be TRU exclusives, and I kept my eyes out for them. Only they never made it.
Then I spotted one in Marshalls. Then, looking through the discount chains, I found a few more. One at Tuesday Morning. One at Ross. Not available at Hasbro Toy Shop, and the only other place is eBay, where they are surprisingly not cheap.
I should have thought through
why they would be found only at clearance stores and not even at HTS. The answer is that Hasbro knew these were turds. Seriously, they are in competition for the worst Hasbro product
ever for me.
So far, after finding Optimus, Bumblebee, and the Ratchet/Soundwave two pack, I only opened Optimus and that is the way they are going to stay. The rest are going on eBay.
The problem -- and it's a big one -- is that the Kre-O blocks are not Lego blocks. They don't have the same tolerances. They don't stay together as well. Kre-O also made some very poor design decisions when making these.
Making these models work would be a challenge for Lego bricks. For Kre-O, they are just failures. I just tried transforming Optimus from robot to truck. During the process:
- the door/arm assembly fell off
- the front truck plate fell off
- the head fell off
- the door/arm assembly fell apart again after being fixed.
The parts don't stay together, and they are also more vulnerable to temperature than Lego blocks. The first time I put Optimus together, it was in sunlight. One of the pieces refused to stay on. It would physically
launch itself off the other piece. Every time.
Sunlight. Since then, it has behaved.
A mystifyingly bad decision was to put Optimus' head over an already occupied post. This means that any stress (like from, say, moving the parts around to transform it) will cause his head to go flying.
What you end up with is a terrible, unconvincing truck, a squat, kibbly robot, and a mess of parts falling off any time you go between them. Going into this product, I was willing to accept a few compromises to the models if they had something that transformed without having to rebuild it. But, not only do you have ugly models, but you have to rebuild the @#$%ing things every time anyway since they fall apart. It's
awful.
Congrats, Hasbro -- you finally killed Kre-O. Hopefully they'll continue doing the class sets, but this was just sad.
