Mattel Hot Wheels Crash Curve Playset Toy H6291

I can’t imagine what Mattel was thinking in designing this product unless it was to glorify car crashes and show off inventive techniques in injection molding. The set comes with what seems like a thousand pieces and an equal number of plastic stickers that require application to many parts. I can just imagine that after a few days of playing, these little street signs, lamposts, and barricades will be scattered around the house. That’s after you spend an hour or more working your way through an instruction sheet that looks like some kind of engineering schematic. The instructions consist mostly of diagrams with a million lines and arrows indicating how parts should be snapped together and where the stickers should be applied. However the little actual written instruction that’s provided is in ten different languages, so the assembly guide features awkward blocks of type that amount to a bare minimum of advice on putting the toy together or playing with it.

Aside from the complexity of its assembly, I really wonder about the whole concept of this product. The idea is that a little spring launcher pushes the included car up a ramp where it can “crash” by falling through a trap door on an elevated piece of toy roadway. For one, is it really advisable to teach children that car crashes are exciting? The cover of the package consists of a variety of photos showing blazing car crashes in action. I would think there are many other possibilities for toys that involve fewer scenarios of death and injury.

And finally, how much fun does it actually provide? The little launcher has enough power to push the car up an incline to the crash location but, as another review noted, not enough oomph to push the car around the rest of the track.

To be fair…after assembling this for my nephew yesterday, he is still playing with it. But it will be interesting to see how long the novelty lasts. I will be glad to update this if the toy proves to be a long-term favorite.

These Hot Wheels sets seem to be mostly designed for people who need a quick, relatively cheap gift for a kid. It obviously takes effort to design and produce these things, so why can’t Mattel expend their talents creating products that are fun, easy to use, simple to assemble, and are based on positive values rather than actions of destruction. It doesn’t seem as if it would be all that difficult.

I had fun with Hot Wheels when I was a kid, so I don’t have any objection to them at all in principle. And my nephew still plays with his box of toy cars that he has gotten in the last few years. But the various track sets and their complex parts seem to quickly find their way to a box in the closet.
Rating: 1 / 5

Son loves this toy. Only wish that it came with more connector pieces so that I could connect the radical playset and the delivery building together into a complete, self-contained track.
Rating: 4 / 5