Friday 5 April 2013

Today's Review: Assembling Hot Wheels Sets Without Instructions

It is my son's birthday tomorrow, and we normally end up buying a massive present that is too big or awkward to wrap correctly, which means we have to set it up the night before in the living room. Toy kitchen, train track, all that kind of stuff. This time we managed to buy a few hefty bin bags full of Hot Wheels sets and tracks. Quite cheap, but obviously without any instructions or packaging, so trying to assemble it all was not going to be easy.

Thankfully, the internet provided me with some information. Some of the sets had certain stand out pieces, which I could search for in order to find scanned instruction manuals, even YouTube demonstration videos. Without the internet I would probably still be on my hands and knees now, relying on common sense alone.

Not that that's too bad either. Most of the launcher type pieces are designed to follow on one from another with a domino effect, so it was pretty easy to piece together a decent sized track to launch small, wheeled metallic slipping hazards all over my living room. But common sense only gets you so far, and with those kind of pieces. There were a couple of bags so full of random, disconnected bits and pieces, with no discernible landmarks, I had no choice but to give up, shove them back in the bag and vow to find out what the hell it is later on.

So if you can, buy your Hot Wheels with some instructions, or some semblance of knowledge of what it is. You can get some of the basic stuff done with your wits, but once things get more specific and fiddly, all hope may be lost.

My rating: 3/5

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