I was pleased to have received a sampling of Hasbro’s latest addition to the building-brick genre: KRE-O Transformers. We received a Bumblebee 75-piece set and Kreon minifigure in mid-October, both of which my youngest son immediately helped himself.
This set doesn’t pretend to be any better or different than that other plastic brick company’s product. In fact, there’s even an emblem on the front of the box declaring these bricks fully compatible with other brands’ building bricks.
My youngest son (age six and a half) wasted no time assembling the robot variation of this set. The directions and my son’s fine motor skills for assembling the robot were what I expected, very similar to Lego. He’s able to do about 90% of the tasks, mostly asking for help in separating particularly stubborn bricks. He didn’t fail to point out that the set is “just like Lego”, and wondered “Why isn’t this Lego?”
This is the point where we all expected that you can flip, twist and rotate the robot and voila! You’d have a car! But this is not the case. To go from the robot to the vehicle, you have to disassemble everything and start from scratch with a separate set of directions. Definitely not what we expected for Transformers! Both the kids and the parents were disappointed in this, but our son took it in stride.
It didn’t take long for my youngest son to convert Bumblebee into the vehicle.
The 75-piece KRE-O Transformers Bumblebee kit retails for about $7.99 and can be found at major toy retailers. There is also a 325-piece kit that retails for $19.99. KRE-O kits are also available as Optimus Prime, Starscream, Megatron, and Sentinal Prime.
We also received a free “Kreon” minifigure sample. The larger kits include these Kreon figures:
GeekMom is pleased to pass along two promotional events that Hasbro is sponsoring if you are interested in purchasing KRE-O products for your loved ones this holiday season.
First, you can visit this link at Coupons.com, view a short promotional video and download a coupon worth $5 off any $20 KRE-O purchase (through 27 November).
Secondly, Hasbro’s KRE-O website is sponsoring a Great Brick Giveaway, where they’re giving away one KRE-O brick set per hour, 7 days per week, from now through December 9th. That’s over 1000 KRE-O sets, and all you have to do is visit their website and play the game! (Login is required).
Note: The KRE-O Bumblebee and Kreon minifigure were provided free of charge for review purposes.
You need to hand in your Geek card or lose some Geek points. LEGO is always LEGO, not Lego.
It’s a losing battle. The word is now in the public domain and we can use it however we want. This is coming from someone who sorts his kids’ (and some of them are mine) LEGO or Lego Bricks or Legos or whatever, by color in separate bins!
Great article by the way. My 10 year old son got one of these sets “Ratchet” and not only are the pieces compatible, but in many cases they are exact clones of Lego bricks, same slopes and everything. The real question will be – will they get mixed in to the “real” Lego collection? That’s our current dilemma, whether to allow contamination! They are pretty cool, but my son was disappointed that they don’t ‘transform’ and he soon set to work trying to make one that would (and failed).
Hi Wave,
I am usually geekier than this — I have always been so diligent to spell those Danish building bricks “LEGO” (I even remembered to do it in the photo caption).
I am going in right now to make those corrections!!!!
Somedad: Thanks for sharing your good experiences with the KRE-O kit. I think I might challenge my sons to try to make a truly Transforming version of Bumblebee, perhaps by cross contaminating the kit with LEGOs 🙂
At first I used to break out a gallon-sized zip-top bag to keep the boys’ LEGO kits separated. All those bags went into a bigger bin. As of late, I’ve had to just set up bins with “City”, “Pirates”, “Indiana Jones”, “Harry Potter”, etc. It’s a losing battle also.
Thanks for the comments, friends!
And I just learned that we GeekMoms are not to use the all-caps moniker for that Danish building brick company. So I did have to change them all back.
It’s not really ethical to have a promo as part of a review. Granted, its not a review of a life-saving drug or something similarly crucial, but theres no way you can remain objective if you turn your review into an advertisment. Might I suggest you break it into two separate posts in the future?
Thank you Ramone for your comment. It’s interesting you mention this because I was hesitant to use the term “Promotion” here in the first place.
I wonder if “Special Offer” might have been better choice of words, since this is something Hasbro is doing with or without GeekMom’s mention.
This is different than other “promotions” that GeekMom has sponsored in the past.
I might be changing this title 🙂
I just have to say that I personally am disappointed in the mini figures, one of ours lost a leg and the others have visable stress cracks from normal play just a day out of the package. Lego minifigs can last years (or not), but I haven’t had one break within a week the way one of the Kreons did. The rest of the kit was great, right on par with Lego and superior to Mega Bloks.
Thank you for the feedback Jenny. Good to know! Our KRE-O minifigure is currently in pieces on the dining room table, but I think my sons took it apart on purpose 🙂