Review: Kevin's DX Action Cruiser

I bought this in Asda a while ago for my son's 5th birthday. Being an 'Alien Force' toy and therefore a couple of years(ish) old, it was half price at £15. And for £15 it's pretty good, despite the big disappointment which I'll come to in a minute.

But first a description.

This is Kevin's car, which anyone who's sat through any of the Ben 10 Alien Force episodes will know, features quite a lot. Things can never be straight forward, so as well as being a car this transforms into 'battle mode' with wings and large guns.

Plus 'DNA alien ball-shooting' action.

Except - and this is where a lot of the bad reviews elsewhere result from - the balls don't exactly 'shoot'. They roll, very gently out of the front of the car. Sometimes. Their gentle nature means that quite often they don't emerge from the front of the car at all.

Peering inside as best I could to find it, it seems there's no spring involved in the launching mechanism to give it a bit of umph. The button on top simply gives it a bit of a push.

Well, okay, this is a bit of a disappointment, but we can still stick a couple of figures inside the car, right? Well, no. The ball-launcher takes up quite a lot of space - in fact all of the passenger side of the car, which means only Kevin will fit.

Unless you stick someone in the boot, which is certainly possible as it's quite large.

The other complaint I've read about is that the wings/sides of the car fall off very easily. They do come off, but I'm not sure it's quite as easy as others have made out. I actually think that, knowing they can come off, my 5yo gives them a bit of a helping hand to make the car 'explode' in battle.

There's one additional thing you can do with the balls. If you fill them with the supplied powder and then add water you get a gel-like substance. Not entirely sure what the point is of this and I haven't tried it since we have a baby in the house and I fear things being eaten.

All in all, for £15 I was quite happy and all the boys at the birthday party were extremely happy to play with it.