RoboRaptor

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It was with sadness that we slowly packaged up the Robosapien, and sent it back off to WowWee. We tried to fill the void it left with cameras, computers, even high end home theatre systems, but nothing replaced the thrill of steering a fully animated robot around the office, wreaking destruction when and where we pleased.

Pros

  • Roars a lot

Cons

  • Roars a lot, walking is flawed, very few functions

Bottom Line

Not a patch on the Robosapien; our time with the RoboRaptor was more of a trial than a fun filled afternoon.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 179.00 (AUD)

Thus it was with much glee that we fired up the RoboRaptor, ready to pick up where we left off. The raptor offers a more simplified control system, and less functions than it's more advanced brother, but that shouldn't make a difference right?

Wrong. Using the RoboRaptor was like using an entirely new toy; a much worse toy. It suffers most of the problems the Robosapien suffered, but loses all forms of flexibility as well. We found it plain, boring and fundamentally quite useless.

Problems were evident from the moment we fired it up; the RoboRaptor struggles to even take a step. No wonder these things became extinct. There was something extremely wrong with the foot design, and so even the basic walking motion seemed to not work half the time. For the first five or ten seconds of being told to move, the Raptor just shuffled his feet and did nothing, then he begun to intermittently plod forward, with the same agonising sluggishness that plagued his humanoid counterpart.

To compound the problem, he uses the same turning system as the Robosapien, that is, he can't move diagonally, he has to stop and rotate on the spot, then continue to lumber forwards. This function was something we complained about in our other review, and it has somehow managed to get worse here. The foot design again proved to be the problem, meaning it took the Raptor over 5 minutes to turn in a full 360 degrees.

What really appealed to us about the Robosapien was the little things, like the dance function, which came complete with music and Justin Timberlake's "The Robot". He had a mountain of witty one-liners, and all his limbs and body parts were capable of moving individually or in unison. You could pick things up if they were in the right place and punch, kick and throw, as well as a host of other options.

The RoboRaptor on the other hand has almost none of these. His head and tail can be swung from side to side, and if he walks up to something he can try to pick it up in his mouth. Aside from that, he really has no cool functions. He has a tendency to roar a lot, at pretty much everything, which may appeal to some people by adding some authenticity, but it wasn't a patch on the hilarious repertoire of the Robosapien. The controller was fairly easy to get the hang of, largely due to having less buttons than its predecessor. There is a single pad that controls walking, and a second pad to move the head and tail. The shoulder buttons control the targeting system, allowing RoboRaptor to move towards a specific target, assuming you can get him moving at all.

The Raptor also has no way of detecting when things are in front of him. Numerous times he walked into a box or a shelf and just got stuck there, letting lose muted roars till somebody freed him. Combine this with the poor walking controls, and it leads to a lot of frustration as your cool robotic dinosaur tangles with and loses to a cardboard box.

What it comes down to is that a toy needs to be fun. The Robosapien was a ball to play with due to the sheer number of features he presented. The Raptor on the other hand, we simply couldn't find anything to do with. Some people might argue that it is a children's toy and that they would enjoy, but we can assure you, we have the maturity of a five year old, and after a few minutes with it we had lost interest completely.

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