There’s something pretty cool about building a toy. You start off with a box of blocks and pieces and an hour later you have your very own toy that looks like more than a bundle of parts. The concept of toy building also aims to provide more hours of entertainment outside of the finished product. Sadly, a lot of toys fail to produce this element due to rigid designs and limited creative freedom. Snap Ships is as modern as creative toys go. There’s a large range of cool ships to collect and make, an app that will make all those tech-savvy kids happy and the freedom on offer here delivers a substantial amount of entertainment.
In short, Snap Ships is a range of modular spacecrafts created by snapping pieces of parts together to make a fully-fledged vehicle. I would use the word “blocks” here but this range of toys is far from your average trip to the LEGO store. Instead of relying on blocks to make parts to put together, Snaps Ships used modular parts that snap into one another.
Watch our Snap Ships review below
This sort of approach comes with its own set of perks. The toy range is easier to make, doesn’t break as fast and kids who don’t want to read through hundreds of pages of directions can still build their dream ship.
Play Monster sent me two Snap Ships to fiddle around with. One is the Lance and the other is called Scorpion. Each of the Snap Ships belongs to a faction in the toy’s story. The story isn’t anything deep and meaningful but I don’t think it has to be. There’s a war going on between the Komplex who are deadly aliens who travel the galaxy and take over planets. The Forge, on the other hand, are highly trained aliens and humans who defend the galaxy from these power-hungry creatures. It just so happens that both factions use spaceships to fight and these spaceships are the Snap Ships.
You will know what faction’s ship you have by looking at it. The Komplex boasts a black and maroon colour while the Forge has ships with a grey and blue shade. The Snap Ships range includes larger ships and smaller ones. These range from R300 to R1000 depending on the ship you buy. The most expensive ones, like the Scorpion I cover here, include more moving parts and modules to work with. The Lance is a smaller ship with fewer parts. However, given the scale of this galactic war, the sizes add to the fleet you’re trying to build.
Each Snap Ships box comes with a few things inside of it. You get the instruction manual, a black tray with all the parts and a poster of the ship you bought. The black tray is the most important part of the experience here. This tray includes all the blocks and modules as well as a character or two. The instruction manual then details how to build the ship you have. It also includes variations you can build using the same parts.
Not knowing anything about Snap Ships I was surprised to see how few parts there were in the box. I am used to building LEGO sets that include thousand of blocks so this was a breath of fresh air. The general ship design reloves around a base which are square-ish blocks. Everything then gets snapped onto these blocks but the instruction manual explains all this in great detail.
If you have built LEGO set before, the general building experience is much the same here. Each page tells you what you need and how to go about snapping the parts together. I built both of these ships with my niece who is 11 and she found the instructions clear and simple. I often had to rotate a block or two to fix an error she made but it wasn’t anything too challenging.
She often struggled to snap a block into another but she has tiny fingers and weak hands (I blame sitting on an iPad all day instead of using her hands for stuff). Being Snap Ships, you literally need to snap blocks together which does require a bit of force. Thankfully, each block is designed with a button-like nub that snaps into the other end’s star-shaped hole. The two combined together means things can rotate and jiggle with ease.
The Lance Snap Ship didn’t take too long to make in comparison to the Scorpion. They are two very different ships. One is a fighter plane and the other is a massive carrier responsible for escorting minions to war.
There’s also a stark difference in the general style of the two ships. The Scorpion, belonging to the Komplex packs sharp wings and even claws that come out of the ship. The Lance is a smaller, nimble ship.
Once the ships were done, it was time to fiddle around with them. Each ship comes with some ammunition that can be shot out of missiles. The Scorpion also has drop pods that can be dropped from the ship by pressing down on a panel. This is a pretty cool feature and one I was pleasantly surprised to see.
Unfortunately, most of the “interactive” features on the Snap Ships require fixing and finding once used. The missile ammo flies into the distance and the drop pods smash into pieces so I had to sit and put it all back together. It can end up in a messy situation with lots of smaller pieces going missing here. My niece lost two bullets within 10 minutes.
Once you get bored of the basic build in the box you can then move into the other variations that are also included in the instruction manual. The Scorpion had three builds in total and the Lance had two. These alternative builds offer great value for money and should keep the kids busy for a few hours as they take apart the main build and make the others. You can also go your own route and build your own ship. You can combine all the modules and make something bigger and better if you have the imagination for it.
After spending a week with the Snap Ships I was impressed. The toy range offers some creative things for kids to do while also expanding their mindset by offering the freedom to build whatever they want. Sure, the small pieces will go missing pretty quickly but you can also play without these parts attached.
There’s also a mobile app that you can download before even buying any toy. It comes with some games to play and you can view the Snap Ships in your home in AR. Given how kids love tech, maybe this is a great way to sell them on the toys?
Snap Ships isn’t badly priced. You can start your collection a R300 and expand into the R1000 if you’re looking for the biggest and best builds. Kids will also love them because there’s really nothing cooler than participating in an intergalactic war. With Snap Ships, they just have the opportunity to make the fleet from scratch.
Snap Ships Review
This Snap Ships review is based on two units sent to us to keep by Solar Pop. The South African distributors for the toy. You can find out more about the range here.
