Customer Reviews

Hot Wheels Terrordactyl Track Set

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

First, it took over an hour to put together, including when we realized two pieces of track were mis-labled, AND when we had to take apart a "hard-wired" piece with a screwdriver to fix a flaw. At one point we told my little boy we thought it was broken and we'd have to get another toy -- he put his little hands over his face and burst out in tears, and that broke my heart in a million pieces so we kept at it. We finally got it put together and quickly realized, there is no way in the laws of either physics or engineering that it will ever, ever work the way it is supposed to.

It takes no batteries, which my husband thought would be a plus, and relies on the child pushing a lever to propel cars forward and around the track. The track has two options (theroretically) -- to go all around the loop-the-loop, or shoot at the dinosaur and set the dinosaur into flight.

Yeah right.

If our son were older and knew how it was supposed to work, he would have been sorely disappointed. But as he's three and a half, he thought it was too cool that the cars just launch randomly into space, never once doing what they were supposed to do. If you push the lever too hard, they fly off and hit the cat. If you push more gently, they just whiz and fall off the track.

And the dinosaur? Total garbage. Try to hit it and it just falls off -- no majestic soaring whatsoever.

Total waste of money and time.

My son absolutely loves this horribly designed thing. We bought it yesterday and spent the requisite hour setting it up only to find that we couldn't get the stupid "Fair start Lever" to work the way it seemed that it should. The instructions say to lower the lever and then the players can crank the levers to make the cars go around, but the lever does absolutely nothing. It seems designed to avoid touching the red stop-blocks that it should be holding down. We were able to span the inexplicable gap in this lever with scotch tape and then use a trash can twist wire to permanently affix the start lever to the red stop blocks. Now the cranks are able to fire the cars out all the time.

The toy is a bit complex for my three-year-old, but he loves it anyway. I have to constantly put the pteradactyl back into the "launch tube" because he isn't strong enough to get it seated. He doesn't understand the game aspect of the toy at all, which is why we disabled it, although it doesn't work anyway, but you have to disable it to get the toy to work at all. He also doesn't understand how to set up the volcano and switch the track diverter, but he's happy having the cars launch off of the ramp anyway, so it's just as well.

Some of the older boys in the neighborhood played with it after I rigged it up and they seemed to enjoy the competitive game aspect of it, but I could never give this toy a review above a three because it didn't work out of the box. Anything that has to be rigged with tape and wire to achieve the advertised functionality should get a one, but the kids loved it so much, I gave it a three.

I was really disappointed in this toy. I wish I had read the reviews before I bought it. I have a 5 year old who has a hard time "launching" the cars so that they keep going around the track. Honestly, I have a hard time keeping the car moving around the track. The pterodactyl is suppose to move from side to side so that either car going around the track can hit it and send it soaring, but the wind up mechanism wears down very quickly. Batteries would have been better than the wind up mechanism.

Save your money, there are better car sets out there. My son has hardly played with it since he got it three weeks ago.

I was really concerned after reading the poor reviews, but my son desparately wanted this toy for his 6th birthday, so we got it. As it turns out, this thing is a blast!!! The instructions were a bit vague, so setup took about 20 minutes (of course we didn't notice the reference to online, animated instructions until after we finished putting it together), then we spent another 10 minutes figuring out how to play with it. Me, my husband, our son, and both daughters spent a good hour crowded around it on the floor taking turns whipping the car around the track. Then we left the kids to it for another hour.

It's a great track, with a lot of neat features. The pterodactyl "flies" a little over a foot when it launches, the cars whiz by so fast you can barely see them, and the accelerator mechanism is easy for my 6 year old to use. Batteries would have been better, but the wind up mechanism works fine (and is much cheaper!). The switches that move to aim your car at the pterodactyl after 6 or 7 passes also work great. The only cons we noticed are the poor instruction manual and the piece that holds the pterodactyl up doesn't snap into place so it works itself loose pretty easily. We didn't experience any of the problems these other folks had. I highly recommend this toy. Just be careful to follow the directions exactly during setup.

My 8-year-old son got this as a Christmas present from a relative. I wish I had read all the other reviews before opening it and convinced him to return it and get something else. He was all excited about the pterrodactyl (I think Matel pays their marketting people more than their engineers).

Yes, all 30 some-odd connections are labelled with a letter, but this thing is convoluted and confusing to set up. But you can set it up given about half an hour if you're not schematically challenged. Also, the trick to the lever isn't cutting it off... the cars have to be ON TOP of the red switch in the track, not in front of it, or the wind-up levers won't work. A bad design flaw because the car is difficult to put in that shallow spot, especially in the center of the loop where its difficult to reach and half of the time it just rolls out and then the levers get blocked. As an adult, after a while of working it I could get the car to go around the track and learn the timing of the levers. That's after going through the entire setup checklist, which includes:

1) pulling out two rings

2) pushing in all four volcanoes

3) turning the pterrodactyl off

4) winding it up

5) turning the pterrodactyl on

6) closing the two yellow gates

... then launching the car. I say "car" because although the set has two tracks it only comes with one car. Ironically, the car that is included isn't even on the list of "recommended" cars for the track that are displayed in the instructions. Also, whereas I could get the car to work on one track, I never could on the other. And most other Hot Wheels we tried just flew off either track.

This convoluted mess was too much for my 8-year-old son and he soon resorted to just rolling his cars manually on the track and playing with the pterrodactyl. The box says "5+" on the recommended age, but that's a joke. I could get it to work for me but my son never could get around the track more than twice which frustrated him. I never thought I'd say this... but I wish this toy came with batteries.

Again, I wish I had read the other reviews before opening the box and returned it. This thing is too big to just sit on his bedroom floor and collect dust. We'll probably throw it out in a week when he stops even looking at it. We have had some pretty bad toys before, but you'd think for $45 Matel's engineers could have come up with something better.

My 5 yr. old son got this from his grandparents for Christmas and although he thought it was very exciting, it has not been a good toy. Some of the track pieces broke the very first time that we were putting it together. You cannot buy replacement parts and they broke in such a way that repairing them is impossible. One side still works okay, but my son only wants to watch his father make the cars go because he cannot hit the lever quickly and precisely enough to keep the car going around the track. Do not buy this toy!

I am very disatified with [...].. I purchased this for my grandson for XMAS in October. When he opened it on Christmas and they went to put it together, parts within the box were broken thus rendering the toy useless. When contacting Amazon about an exchange they said no way, it was purchased over 30 days ago... You just lost a customer amazon.com, and if you check my account history over the years I've purchased quite a bit of merchandise through you..

"My son, with great anticipation, watched me spend an hour putting this thing together only to have it not even come close to working like it should have. Like the other reviews, thank goodness he didn't realize that it didn't work correctly because he was four. However since he has to push the cars by hand and rarely do they even make it around the track he tired of it almost immediately. Put the money for this in their college fund.

I made the mistake of buying this toy for my 6 year old for Christmas. It never worked properly. It was hard for my son to place a car in the starting position in order to press the lever. The other track lever has never worked correctly. The cars do not go around the track. The track fell apart after 1 day. Do not recommend this toy.

Parents will definitely need to help build this toy. It is pretty simple and an additional car must be purchased for any real fun. But fun for kids.