BRICKKK Arcade Machine Building Kit, Metal Slug

This was an awesome very detailed and super fun build for my son. He is 15 and autistic and lego/building bricks that’s his jam right now and I’m loving the other choices besides lego that has really cool builds with a lot of pieces and not spend a bunch of money. Lego compatible NOT mini or micro bricks. I hate when we order and there is nothing that says mini or micro in the description and the disappointment in my son’s eyes when we see the micro bricks. So that is why I wanted to do this review not only is is super fun, cool and very detailed it’s lego compatible so your fingers and eyes will enjoy building this! Lol!

I try to give credit where it is due by not comparing it to a giant brand. I am so surprised at the quality of this product and instructions. I am writing this because it is a good product and deserves a good review.

Instruction booklet
One large booklet that listed the qty of packages for each bag number. Despite a couple of mismatched numbers, there are no missing pieces.
In more complex locations, there is an aerial view of how to position the pieces.

If there are similar looking pieces, The booklet listed similar pieces in their size so we do not get confused, eg a 1×3 vs 1×4 flat piece is easy to be confused but this is listed as such in the booklet. Great attention to details.

There is also a color mistmach for the 2×2 block but after a while I figured that out and it wasn’t an issue.

Build quality
It was great! All pieces snapped snug together in places as they should and it is very good quality. The only slightly loose place was the curvature of the hood in blue so I had to use some clear tape to tape them together, but that is not a deal breaker in anyway, just the hood was made of two subcomponents where it could be slightly improved.

All the playable parts are also really good quality. I won’t play with it but it is fun display set. Oh some bricks have printed patterns and there weren’t any stickers I need to use much except for the game banner and the side round sticker. Even so, the sticker are good quality, made of thin acrylic sheets and they are thick!

I am already checking out their other sets.

Had a lot fun building this set. The theme on metal slug is fantastic, always like the series. A lot interesting bottoms/interaction build in, make a very cool display piece. Instruction is pretty easy to follow, and bricks are good quality. The main draw back is some of the mechanism (gears/springs) is not as solid, that on top it’s buried deep inside the build make it hard to fix if any brick comes loss.

But for the metal slug theme, amount of element they included in the design, and building experience, it’s definably worth it.

I’m a total sucker for arcade machine collectibles, SNK properties and mechanical gimmicks, so when I saw this I was immediately interested. This isn’t my first pantasy set, I purchased the Astro Boy/Tetsuwan Atom set last year, and I can say that this was fairly congruous with that experience — which isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Let’s start with the positives. The basic idea and design are both really cool. The idea of pressable buttons causing mechanical gimmicks to trigger is interesting and ambitious. The Slug vehicle is translated to building blocks pretty faithfully, and it has real rubber treads to boot. The “stickers” for the marquee and such, are actually solid plastic-laminated affairs, and fit well to the bricks they’re meant to adhere to. The smaller custom-labeled pieces are actually printed bricks — and good quality ones at that. The minifigs of the characters are quite detailed, and like the Slug, are faithful to their original designs. I’ve never been a fan of the ball-and-socket arm design that these have, but it’s certainly not a strike against them. The directions are also very detailed, and despite only being in chinese, I was almost never at a loss for where to place something.

So, is Lego gonna be packing up their plastic molds and going home? Nah. First of all, ambitious though this may be, the gimmicks don’t work that well in practice. The cannon on the side, “powered” by the green button, is very finicky, just like the rest of the moving parts in this set. Ideally, when you make a product for mass production like this, you want to make sure it’s uniform enough to be built so that there’s a certain amount of leeway for parts to work in concert with one another. Again, this isn’t an electronics kit or a wooden clock; these are pre-made plastic bricks, and they have to fit together within that framework. I futzed with the cannon for upwards of an hour, and it ran the gamut from working well and then getting stuck, to the base becoming unfixed when the button was pressed. The gears work 100% like they’re supposed to, until you attach the cannon. Second, the “scaffolding” or fire escape or what have you, that the cannon and tank sit on, is terribly flimsy, and would fall apart with little pressure. Another sticking point was the depth of the buttons. You don’t add the non-functional yellow and blue buttons until around bag 5, and by then you’ve already set up the green and red buttons. Which, by now, are attached to the guts/functions of the machine and basically sealed off by the panel. The directions have nothing in them about setting the buttons to a certain height, so I had 4 buttons that looked terrible, because they weren’t at the same height. So I had to partially disassemble the front, and play with specific gear-tooth interlocking as well as rubber band tension to get the buttons to sit right. Again, this is the kind of thing I expect in a model or robotics kit, not a fun flego set. Next is more of a nitpick, but I felt it was worth mentioning. The product page’s promo pics strongly suggest that the “coin” is metal. It isn’t. They’re just gold plastic bricks. The manual got “out of sync” for me around end of bag 7. Not sure if the printing was different, or the dye lot for the bricks changed or what, but upon starting to assemble the Slug vehicle, the manual was showing brown bricks — I had gray. Ditto bags 8-11. So it became decoding which color in the manual was what was in the actual bag. Gray was light brown, brown was beige, etc. Lastly, the bricks themselves are, of course, no Legos. The quality is merely “okay”.

My overall thoughts: If you’re going to ape a brand while simultaneously attempting to assert that you’re some legitimate rival of theirs, get the basics down first. Quality control is key, and between the missing parts (and never getting back to me) of the first set I bought, and the glaring issues of this set, it’s clear that no matter what properties they license, Lego is in no danger from these guys. For the money they delusionally think that their products are worth, you should definitely get more. But, sadly, I expect to see more poor attempts to cash in on SNK franchises, as they’re now 96% owned by well-known human rights violators, who probably don’t care who uses the property, so long as they can make a buck.