83160 Zuru MAX Dino Hunt NON-LEGO Review - Dino Adventure, 2023

TL;DR:

• Original Price:  $39.95
• Pieces: 552
• Minifigure(s): No
• Sticker Sheet: Yes
  
• Pros: colorful and cheap (if on clearance)
• Cons: cheap and confusing

Assembly: 

Bag group 1 - T-Rex & Raptor

Bag group 2 - Tree

Bag group 3 - Pad thing & Dish thing

Bag group 4 - Motorcycle

Bag group 5 - Jeep

Bag group 6 - Helicopter

 Leftover Pieces & Sticker

• Interesting Techniques:
• The use of scalloped SNOT piece to make tank treads is pretty efficient; with Lego you'd have to use the un-scalloped piece and add 1x1 round tiles or plates to mimic the effect

• Interesting Pieces:
• The tree branches are designed to only fit together one way; on the one hand, this ensures that the final build will look like the picture, but on the other hand it denies any creativity

• The textured slopes on the pad thing are neat, I could see them being repurposed for the paws of a statue lion a'la NYC Library, for example

• The grooved slopes on the Jeep's fenders are also nice non-standard parts

• The helicopter's forewheel truck is an interesting shape, and could possibly be used for an unusual droid body, perhaps

• Pain Points:
• The bags were oddly labeled, having a word and then an odd alphanumeric code. The tiny white letters were also harder to find than the big numbers on Lego sets

• The T-Rex arm pins felt like I was about to break them when pushing them in, and the leg pins actually fall out of the leg pieces they're supposed to be part of (I'll probably end up gluing them)

• The T-Rex and raptor jaws only have two detentes: closed or wide open, and the raptor legs are unposeable (turns out the Lego versions have the same problems, so this is a mark against all of them)

• A lack of any sort of story and pictures of figures interacting with the sub-builds render the pad thing and dish thing difficult to understand
• The transparent stickers were not cut properly: the stripes were the same size as a 1x3 tile, the claw marks were too big for a 2x2 tile, and the arrows were way too big for 1x2 tile
  

• STAMP (Stickers Across Multiple Pieces)—never a good idea in my book

• Helicopter cabin—a single piece—was unopenable once assembled, so if there were minifigs (see note below) you would either have had to place them when building it—and not be able to take them out again—or else have a pilotless helicopter 
  
• My Modifications:  
• I had to disassemble the helicopter's nacelles in order to be able to place tiny triangles

 

I only picked this up because it was on mega clearance (for a third of the lowest price for a single Lego T-Rex) and I figured it would be worth giving it a try. I've gotten plenty of "fakegos" before, mostly at the Dollar Tree, but I use most of those for scratchbuilding miniatures (model cities and buildings and the like) and make sure to never mix them with the real thing. Still, nothing saying that I can't have my Lego minifigs running away (or riding) a Zuru dinosaur...especially since it means that money can be spent on further sets. At the full price, however it's almost the same price as a similar Lego set (which actually does come with minifigs and has comprehensible play features in the rest of the build), so I'd have expected either more bricks or better overall quality for that cost.

Oddly enough, there's another version of this exact same set that does come with this company's version of minifigs; without them, the vehicles feel rather empty and the sub-builds pointless, hamstringing the play value. I'm not sure if $8 extra is worth it for the three figures and accessories, but it does make the set feel less incomplete.

As is often the case with fakegos, there were some unusual pieces (perhaps designed to be different from official Lego pieces whose copyrights hadn't yet expired), but the overall quality standards weren't up to what I've come to expect from the official pieces. The Jeep's snorkel kept falling off, for example, and the T-Rex felt downright fragile. The stickers were poorly cut (they took quite a lot of bending to even get a fingernail under, and as you can see in the above shots the cuts range from too small to way too big) and Lego stopped using STAMPs a long time ago.

The build itself was fairly normal, with nothing too much out of the ordinary with any of the vehicles or "things," and the tree was just a question of figuring out how the canopy pieces fit on the branch pieces. It looks ok when everything's assembled, but the limited poseability of the dinosaurs and the lack of any figures makes it less than noteworthy either for display or play.

I tried to be fair with this review, the same as if I were reviewing a brand new Lego set, and give my opinion on the set as it is, regardless of who made it. Sadly, the differences are noteworthy, and not in a good way. I'd only be able to recommend it if you could get it for very cheap, and only then if you wanted to use it for scratchbuilding or putting on gear (for example, like James Gurney's brilliant dinosaur fire engine or the old Dino Riders tv show)...which is probably what I'll end up using this for.

Score (out of 5 🧱):

• Price: 🧱
• Process: 🧱🧱
• Presentation: 🧱
• Play: 🧱🧱
• Pieces: 🧱

• Total: 🧱