Bionicle - Barraki product reviews

They are very cool and they are a bit expensive, but good. It is good to have cool toys to play with like the Barraki. They are the best bionicles I have seen for now.
The people at my school liked to see them because they are very wicked. I liked the squids and how they clipped on to the Barraki itself. Lots of people could buy them and we could have little battles between them or with the Mahri, which are the good guys.

I guess my kid and I play rough, because we were forever reassembling it. This didnt stop us from having a great time playing with it. By far our favourite addition to the Bionicle family of toys, the biggest highlight is the little rubber squids. They are something so totally unexpected from Lego that it took us a while to realise, based on the pictures on the box. We were expecting some kind of rigid plastic shape that was spring-launched. One of the best!

It has been many, many happy years since I got my first Lego kit... I wasn't much older than my son is now, and though the kit was simply a pile of bricks in various colours, with a few odd shapes mixed in, it held wonders almost beyond imagining. Lego has always reminded me of living cells... the blocks themselves are simple and compact, unimportant alone, but able to combine is so many combinations and produce almost anything one can imagine... just as chemical elements do too...

Lego basically fired up my love of science and investigation of the world around us, and has been a vital metaphorical tool in my discoveries of various aspects of nature, from 'how our bodies work' down the scale to subatomic quantum physics. However, my son just loves to build creepy monsters straight out of the instruction book at present, though he has started to see other building options inherant in the modular nature of Lego. That's where these come in...

Since the first of the Bionicle models came out, my little man has found the magic and wonder of them to be absolutely irresistable... much to the fear of my bank account... but let's face it, a toy like this is really something special and should never be overlooked when the shops are doing sales. The Barraki are the latest generation of this franchise, complete with storyline, histories, comic stories online, and a website too... far more than the simple brick-shaped blocks I started out with.

These models have, as a special feature, little rubberised 'vampiric squids' that are launched from special devices attached to one hand, the other usually being some form of claw, pincer or tentacle, as is fitting with an aquatic theme. He has even crossed the story boundaries and incorporated the shark, from the Aqua Raiders set I bought him a few months back, as the guard/pet of one of the 'senior' Barraki.

Overall, these are a great addition to the Bionicle line, with some novel and unique attributes, as well as having some seriously cool and multi-functional shaped pieces that can be used in any number of ways in other models... I had to laugh when he made a fire truck that launched squids to put out fires, because "...squids can squirt lots of water really hard, so that should be good for putting out fires, right Dad?" That's my little man... Discovery Channel + Lego = One heck of an education!