Before I start the review; If you don't feel like reading, there will be a video review at the very end! We've all been there. Browsing our Facebook or Instagram, when a random ad pops up telling us about a product that we would personally love! Usually, they are based off of whatever you were looking at on your phone, because you know, that's not invasive at all. Well it was just by chance, I was watching someone review old toy playsets from the 80's and the 90's. Checkout that review below!
Weird Toy Playsets
See, growing up in the 80's and early 90's playsets were all the rage for kids. It started off for girls with Polly Pocket, but eventually a much rougher, tougher, scarier version came to toy shelves called "Mighty Max"! Me and my friends had TONS of them. If you never heard of Mighty Max, checkout a commercial for my favorite playset below.
Mighty Max Toy Commercial
Well after watching the review on old playsets, Facebook AND Instgram started telling me I needed to check out this NEW playset being distributed by Oriental Trading. If you never heard of Oriental Trading, they are a magazine that sells party favors and decorations. They have been around forever, and they are great for teachers and fund raising. Growing up, my mom owned and operated a day care, so she was always ordering from the magazine, and I was actually shocked to still see them in business. Curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to checkout the playset. I was told via the website, I could get this playset for $4.74 with free shipping! Less than five bucks to relive my childhood and do a review for my blog? It seemed like a no brainer, so I made the plunge!
Sure enough, the playset arrived to my doorstep less than a week later, shipping was free, and I spent exactly $4.74. I opened the box, and here I found the Monster Mayhem playset! Right off the bat, the packing is way better than I expected. This already felt like this was money well spent, I and received a good product.
Before we dive into the toy itself, let's checkout the packaging. On the back side of the playset, we see that this is a series of three! I was unaware there were more than one of these, but I ended up getting Creepster Island. Just looking at all three playsets, I'm willing to bet that Zombie Escape is the best one. It looks like you get a toy car, and that big eye rolls out of the playset like a trap.
Apparently monsters are escaping everywhere! Here we see a close up of the Mummy Mystery. This one looks like the worst of the three. Not much going on, unless something great happened behind the Sphinx, I would def. buy this one last.
Here we see a close up of Creepster Island, the playset I have purchased. It looks similar to the Mummy playset, but it appears that web will open up, giving us another little "area" to play in. Also, we see that the playsets have a button on the top of the head that will have the face drop down to reveal all!
Hey well look at that! They have a free app! I'll go ahead and checkout the app at the end of the review, so hang tight!
And finally we have Zombie Escape. Like I said before, this playset seems to be the best on of the three.
Flipping the package over, we are told there are five monsters who hide inside the Creepster Island.
Pushing that button on the top of the playset is promising some big scares!
This seems to be a big trend today in the toy world. "Blind boxes". The idea is, you buy them in hopes to get a new collectible, or in this case, a new monster(s). While the idea is fun, there are many flaws to it. Think of the whole process as buying trading cards. You open a pack of cards hoping to get some great cards, but there is big opportunity you get a couple you already have. See, with cards it's no big deal. They don't take up much space, there are plenty of people you can trade with, and cards generally aren't that expensive. The problem here is, we don't know how many monsters there are, and if the only way you can get monsters is by purchasing playsets. Even worse, the packaging tells us there are only four playset, so once you have the four sets, if you want to collect the monsters you are missing (assuming there is a way to tell what your missing) you have to rebuy these playsets, and as I mentioned previously, there is no guaranteed you get monsters you don't have! This could result in you having multiples of the same toys you already have! So unless your kids entire class is into these, there is a good chance trading toys and figures is not going to be happening.
We have ripped off the plastic bubble, to reveal what monsters we get!
For under five dollars, these monsters are really impressive! The molds are very detailed, and are a nice firm rubber. However; there is one HUGE problem with them. Can you spot it?
It may looks like a cool paint job, where the skin is half green half tan, but its actually the paint chipping right off! Let me be really clear. This wasn't me, really scrubbing and picking at the paint to have it chip off. Just simply touching the figure, the paint started to chip... ya know what? Chip is the wrong word, it just flakes off. I'm not exaggerating, the paint just comes right off the figure from the second you touch it! This becomes a big red flag, because this toy is recommended for ages 4 and up, and lets be honest, kids put everything in their mouths, and I'm not sure if you want them putting a toy in their mouth that paints just falls off by barely touching it. Now, the green is not paint. The green is the rubber, but the black, grey, tan and red is paint. What is strange however; is the black will not chip off, but the rest will. The red and grey, does not flake off as easily though. You really need bend and scratch the figure to chip and flake, but it will come off. My best guess is, before giving them to your kids, rinse them in hot water, and strip the paint off. It's probably an acrylic base paint, but better safe than sorry.
Also included was this small fold out showing us the multiple playsets, and a sneak peak at some of the other monsters.
Here we go! Out of the packaging we have the skull ready to go. The plastic is actually very study, and very impressive looking. The paint does not come off of the playset, so no worries there!
On top of the playset we have the button that opens up the playset. So lets push it and see what's inside.
Now we are talking! The playset opens up with a snap, and we can now take a closer look. The spider we cage does in fact open up on hinges, so you can put a monster in there. The face at the bottom and hands, can fold up and down. The opening under the spider can also fit a monster, and the butt of the spider also ups up for another play area. The lizard in the right corner, doesn't have as much in terms of playability (or my imagination isn't as good as a child's) but the tail does move back and forth. However; The tail does fall out very easily and is definitely another choking hazard, so be aware!
So here is how the playset looks once is opens up and ready to play.
I was a little skeptical that all the monsters would in fact fit into the playset at once, so I grabbed the little foldout and decided to see if it works. And look at that! They do all fit, and we can close it up! Now according to the package, with all the monster inside, when we open it up, monsters will jump out and scare us! Let's see if this promise lives up to the hype!
The playset does exactly what it promised it would do! The monsters jumped out, and everything popped up and out! I must admit something. This was the only time I was able to get the bottom half to pop up like this. It must have been a total coincidence, that it happened when I was filming, because I was not able to get a repeat!
So how does the Creepster Island toy grade? Let's go to the report card!
This is a major pass! The only reason this toy didn't get a perfect rating was due to the paint flaking. That was the only major flaw I could find in the product. Sure, you could say the tail falls out, and the face and hands don't spring up every time, but you are paying under $5, so I can't take points away for it not being perfect. I also didn't take away points for the "blind box" element of the toy, because a lot of people actually enjoy this system, so that didn't feel fair either. If you can still scoop this toy up for $4.74 with free shipping, go do it now! Kids will no doubt love this toy!
As promised, let's checkout the app! A quick search, and I was able to find it pretty quickly. Not much in terms of what we can expect, but lets see what it has in store for us.
As the app opens up, we are greeted with this splash loading screen. I'm guessing these are some of the characters that we can collect. What's even crazier, none of the figures in my playset are on this screen. So how many guys are there?!
On the main screen we have three options. "The Dungeon" "Monster Match" and "Settings". Settings is just what language you want to pick, so no need going into that. Ok, let's checkout "Monster Match" first.
Once we click on Monster Match, we are taken to this screen. Look at that! A fourth playset! The "Wolf's Den". So that right there leads me to believe this toy line is bigger than I thought. But let's stick to what we have. So I click on the "Creepster Island"
Well it appears, this is some sort of game I will be playing, so I pick easy, and off we go!
Well this is a bit of a let down. All we have is a simple matching game. You take turns with the computer trying to remember where each character is. I played a few games, and the characters do rotate in terms of who you will see. But other than that, nothing changes. Ok, lets go checkout "The Dungeon".
Ok, the dungeon shows us all the characters available. There are five pages of different characters! That tells me, there must be a way to get more characters besides buying the playsets!
If you click on a character, you are sent to their stat page. The plus and minus lets us add them to our collection. We also get to see some fun facts about them, their rarity and special powers. Adding a character to your collection, will just make their profile light up on the previous screen.
Sadly, this is it. I went and searched for the Wolf's Den and found nothing. No pictures of it. There is legitimately nothing about this playset. The company doesn't have a website, and the other playsets all show up as "discontinued" on oriental trading. I was able to find ONE website that was selling the zombie escape playset.
Another thing I found disheartening. When I was google searching Creepster Island (the playset I bought) all the figures were the same as the ones I recieved, leading me to believe, you will never get different figures, unless, by chance other people received the same guys that I did. So what happened? My guess, whoever made these had bigger plans and the whole line just tanked. It's a shame too, because I feel like this could have been a fun line of toys for kids.
As promised, here is a video unboxing and review: