Best-Lock Construction Toys Review
"Build a Lot, Pay a Little"
Sneaking onto shelves in discount toy sections of stores like Walgreens and now Toys-R-US, Best-Lock promotes itself as a low-cost alternative to "other brands", which, from style of the packaging, is obviously Lego. At first glance, Best-Lock looks like its could be. After all, Lego is "just" a bunch of plastic blocks. Why shouldn't blocks be less expensive?
I bought a Best-Lock Military Set to find out, and it turns out that Best-Lock is cheaper because it's a lot worse.
Concept
My Best-Lock set was a military set. It doesn't really take a great deal of thought to figure out that children might like soldiers. However, Lego, in addition to licensing and re-inventing popular brands such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or Batman, also creates its own clever and imaginitive worlds that children can not only play in, but grow up in.
Packaging - Lots of Pieces
Both sets package all the little pieces in plastic bags. To me, it seemed as if Best-Lock organized parts based on what was the cheapest to make, essentially putting things in bags based on which factory or section of the factory made them. Lego, on the other hand, organizes its parts based on what makes the most sense for you to make the toys.
So, if you open a large Lego set, you will find that each of the different vehicles comes largely in its own bag of pieces. The instructions clearly indicate which bags of parts you need to open to follow those instructions.
Best-Lock does not do that. I would have been ok had the bags also been organized by kind of part - maybe one for wheels, long skinny pieces, and so on. But Best-Lock's organization of parts struck me as random. I found myself sifting through a pile of 1000 parts in order to make one little motorcycle for my son to get started with while I made the rest of the set.
The Manual
Lego's building manuals don't impress that often, but a trip to Best-Lock land will have you missing them. Lego manuals are relatively easy to follow and they get the job done. With Lego sets, you don't tend to find outrageous build mistakes or building steps that seem like mistakes. Lego seems to have a system for their manuals such that whatever you are building is relatively strong as you build it, and that, you aren't seemingly forced to build counter-intuitively or out of order.
Best-Lock, on the other hand, suffers from poor documentation. Lego actually prints its instructions in a book and numbers the steps. Best-Lock gives you a stack of separate looseleaf sheets. One of the vehicles had no instructions at all, and others had steps that were seemingly out of order. Did the Best-Lock people actually test their manuals? Probably not as well as Lego did, and that's another reason why Best-Lock sets are less expensive.
Blocks Quality
Finally, we turn to the blocks themselves. It's obvious that Best-Lock's manufacturing process has a few steps less than Legos because Best-Lock blocks simply are not that good. Lego blocks stick together so well that you sometimes cannot even see a gap. Best-Lock blocks fit poorly together, and sometimes even have little tabs of plastic on the edges that need to be trimmed off.
Best-Lock Blocks Are Legos that Don't Work
My son loves Legos, and I thought Best-Lock would be a cost effective way for him to get that building pleasure. Instead, poor fit, shoddy workmanship and bad documentation added up to make what should have been a fairly simple afternoon into something less than pleasant. At one point, even my son asked, "How comes these Legos don't work?", and that really sums it up. Best-Lock Blocks are a total waste of money.
