Bakugan Launcher

Durability:5.0 out of 5 stars Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars Educational:3.0 out of 5 stars 

This Baku­gan Launcher is the exact same one that Dan uses, so it makes this cool! That’s beside the point. Accord­ing to my son the launcher is awe­some! There are only two drags about this toy. One, you can only have 2 Baku­gan in the launcher at one time. Two, it takes for­ever to launch a Baku­gan! First, you have to open the Baku­gan hold­ers, take the Baku­gan out, put it in the launch­ing part, set the way you want your Baku­gan to shoot out, and finally pull back the trig­ger and launch your Baku­gan! Over­all this is just anc­ces­sorie, you don’t need this to play the game. But it does make the game more fun!

Durability:1.0 out of 5 stars Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars Educational:1.0 out of 5 stars 

My 8 yr old son got this for his birth­day. He was excited at first because he had seen it on TV and is a big Baku­gan fan. But after a while he was just bummed out about how bad this toy is. Firstly, the toy holds two Baku­gan, how­ever the lit­tle plas­tic doors unsnap and fall off very eas­ily while you’re using it. To load the device, you take either Baku­gan out of its lit­tle holder (care­fully so the doors don’t fall off). You then slide the bar­rel for­ward to reveal a hole in the top, which you are sup­posed to drop the Baku­gan in. This slid­ing mech. jams very eas­ily as it’s very flimsy and it doesn’t come out par­al­lel. After wrestling with this a few times he did what any kid would do and just dropped the Baku­gan down the bar­rel. Whichever way you load the Baku­gan in, if you angle the unit down­ward, the Baku­gan will often just drop out the front and fall onto the floor. The pack­age says the toy has three modes, curve angled or straight. These are deter­mined by two arms which have “hands” at the end of them. When the arms are in the for­ward posi­tion these hands are meant to inter­fere with the flight of the Baku­gan as it launches. They sure do inter­fere, often caus­ing it to just fall out the front, or bounce back into the bar­rel, but if you angle them just right or out of the way, then the Baku­gan will come out. For some strange rea­son these arms fold back and lock into place. They can then be deployed for­ward again by press­ing a but­ton and they spring for­ward. Of course if they’d put this effort into the launch­ing process… The launch­ing process, (which is what this toy is sup­posed to do, after all) is pathetic. If you have man­aged to get the Baku­gan to stay inside the bar­rel, then you retract a small slid­ing but­ton back­ward. The but­ton is under spring ten­sion, but it doesn’t lock into place, it just works like a rub­ber band being pulled back, only harder to use. There is no way to lock the mech­a­nism back and aim the unit. Launch­ing is a process of per­haps fold­ing the arms back, flick­ing them for­ward (not sure why) and then totally sep­a­rately pulling back on the slider while try­ing to stop the Baku­gan from falling out the front of the unit, attempt­ing to aim while hold­ing your hand on the slider and then releas­ing the whole thing at once. Nat­u­rally, if it’s on your wrist your arm wob­bles all over and the Baku­gan drib­bles out the bar­rel nowhere where you wanted it. And you have a hand cramp from try­ing to hold it all together and still while you tried to aim. If they’d spent less effort on get­ting the use­less arms to lock back and used that effort hav­ing the launch­ing process lock back and fire with a but­ton like every other toy known to man and child, it might make some sense. And if you want to put it on your wrist, the strap is a piece of thin nylon web­bing with holes melted into it with a sol­der­ing iron in some sweat shop in China. No grom­mets or edg­ing, just rough, melted holes. Don’t dis­ap­point your kids with this one, even if they are huge Baku­gan fans. And cer­tainly don’t reward the man­u­fac­turer by buy­ing this poorly designed, poorly imple­mented piece of not-so-distant-future landfill.