This is my first toy update, something I hope to make regular on this blog. Today, I’m talking about the Hot Wheels Stunt Loop set or whatever it’s called. $20 Gets you a 2′ piece of track, a loop, and a rubber-band-loaded car catapult to get the car moving. The base of the loop can be rotated to switch from a loop to a jump. Sort of.
The first time I rotated the loop to the ‘jump’ setting, it broke so that it can only be used as a loop. Fine by me, but first sign of a piece of junk. The catapult is too hard for a three-year-old to pull back on his own, which means hours of “Again, Daddy!!” hell for you. The track doesn’t align with the loop well, something we had to fix (semi-permenantly) with scotch tape. After an hour of play, the rubber band wore to the point where no car would execute the loop. Replacement with a bigger band made it work again, but made it even more impossible for a kid to pull back the launcher. (“Again, Daddy!! Again!!”)
In short, this thing is a total piece of crap, and you should take your $20 to a garage sale and buy a box of old track to make a decent, gravity-powered racetrack for your kids.
Coming next week: PlasmaCar review
