Go Mini Review

Last month I was lucky enough to go down to London and visit the Christmas in July toy event! As you can imagine I had great fun playing with all the toys! One particular range that caught my attention was Go Minifrom Golden Bear...

    

As you may know I usually prefer wooden toys to plastic battery operated noisy things, however having young children, they are inevitably attracted to brightly coloured plastic toys! So there has to be a compromise and that's why I was so impressed with the toys on offer from the Go Mini range.

They were bright and colourful enough to appeal to Ben (and Elizabeth of course, anything her big brother's got, she wants too!) but they are also well made and sturdy and best of all don't take batteries!

There is a good selection in the range and we were thrilled to be sent the Stunt launcher to review, which comes with its own exclusive stunt racer. There are 5 more to collect that each have an individual stunt. All of these would also work with the stunt launcher.

 

As soon as Ben saw the box he got excited! What 4 year old boy doesn't love cars?! After getting out of the box (From a mummy point of view I was impressed with this, instead of those annoying twisty wires that I'm used to battling with every time my children get a new toy, there were simple plastic discs to turn which release the toy from it's box quickly and easily and before Ben started to get impatient!)

The set consists of just two pieces, the launcher and the racer, so there are no small, fiddly parts at all, because of this I feel that it may reach under it's recommended age range of 3 - 6, Elizabeth, who is 20 months was fascinated with it and loved carrying the launcher around by it's chunky handle!

And so to the playing...

The launcher has a big chunky handle, a large faced dial, a pull back lever and a start button. After securing the racer on to the ramp (this was a little fiddly and Ben needed help with this the first few times) He proceeded to pump the lever back and forth, both him and his younger sister were very impressed with the revving noise it made while he did this! As he pumped, the needle on the die rose and as it reached the top he pushed the start button to see it race off! At first it wasn't going as fast as we expected, until I realised we had it in stunt mode! Once I switched to race mode, boy did it go!!

After the first few goes where I showed him what to do, Ben can easily do this independently now and it seems to be his go to toy at the moment, being played with most days! It also seems to make a regular appearance in the evening when Daddy gets home from work, I wonder why?!

I like the fact that the stunt racer can be used separately so when we've been visiting family and I only want him to take a small toy along he's quite happy to take just the car and 'pull back' to play.

This is a great set and seems very well made and good quality so it will stand being bashed around by an enthusiastic pre - schooler. At around £20 for the set and £10 for the individual stunt racers it's quite good value for the quality and of course the 'mini' brand! To be honest the link in with the brand is lost on Ben, at four he loves playing with cars, but has no concept of brands and their merchandise. It does however appeal to my (big Kid at heart) Hubby and I'm sure it would have pull with older children.

Needless to say , this set has been a huge hit in our house and I think some of the other cars in the Go Mini range will be making an appearance on Ben's (and possibly Daddy's) Christmas list this year!