By Growing up in the 90s, you were either a Sega child or a Nintendo child; Mario is to Nintendo as Sonic is to Sega. Of course there were also the children who just loved gaming and played pretty much everything 😛
For all those who grew up playing Sonic in the 90s remember it as that classic speed-based platform game where you collected as many gold coins as you could and defeated bad guys like Dr. Robotnik. Sonic has grown and changed over the years, and now you can find him in Olympic games alongside Mario, racing in cars, and as an unleashed fighting machine. Although I was more of a Nintendo child, my husband adored Sonic the Hedgehog and everything Sega, so when I spotted this Pixel Bricks Sonic the Hedgehog toy, I knew it would make a perfect stocking stuffer.
This is a collector’s edition pixelated Sonic the Hedgehog made of 210 Pixel Bricks, which look similar to Lego, but are much tinier. The box shows an image of the finished Sonic, which is the actual size of the toy. I think this was a nice touch because it’s always nice to see exactly what you are getting for your money. When you finish building your Sonic, it will pretty much look exactly like the Sonic you see on the box and I think the finished Sonic looks great and can be appreciated by anyone, particularly those who grew up with the classic Sonic game.
Now what the box fails to mention is that the Sonic can be quite a challenge to build and handle. This is because the instructions are not very clear and the quality of the actual bricks is not the best. This Sonic took my husband about 1 hour to 1½ hours to build and had the instructions been clearer, it could have taken half that amount time to build. The bricks themselves also do not hold together very well. Although the bricks look like Lego blocks, I want to emphasize that these bricks do not compare to the quality of Lego. The bricks are very tiny, which makes them difficult to handle, and they are not as sturdy because when you put two pieces together that are not exactly the same shape and size, they will rotate and slide around. This contributes to this Sonic’s biggest design fault, which is that there is only one little “brick” holding the weight of Sonic’s hands onto his arms. This causes his arms to constantly fall off if the figure is touched or handled in any way.
As a collector’s item, I do think this is a great figure to have for display as part of any retro gaming collection. For my husband and I, this Sonic is a display figure for our collection and I think the pixelated look of the figure looks absolutely great next to our retro gaming consoles. However, for a younger audience who may be looking for the fun of building the figure and/or playing with the figure, I would have to recommend a hard pass on this Sonic because although it may look great, the actual construction is not great and could easily be a choking hazard. For a toy to play with, I would give this a nay, but as a collector’s item for those Sega kids in the 90s, I would say yay! 🙂