Creepy Crawlers Bug Maker

Avoid. Same problem as someone mentioned below, faulty power switch. Unit doesnt stop on. Throw away rubbish.

Christmas time is approaching again and the advert for the 'Creepy Crawlers Bug Maker' are appearing on the television. I purchased this for my 7 year old son for his birthday 6 months ago after he saw this advertised and was transfixed. He straight away lost interest because it took so long to heat up the egg molds that he went off to play with something else that he had for his birthday and left me waiting patiently for the molds to liquefy. It does take approx 15 mins, which doesn't sound a long time, but sitting there doing literally nothing, 15 mins seems to last forever. Perhaps my son had the right idea in leaving it for a while. Once it's ready you push down on the bellow thingy on top and the liquid goes into the molds. (You get 4 molds and enough 'eggs' for 10 bugs in total if you're lucky enough to use them all before the thing breaks, which I'll come to later).Then it's time to wait again. We found the longer you leave the mold to set, the better. Hours preferably !!! 3 of the 4 molds have really small thin legs and as previously mentioned, these easily break off when removing them from the mold case. However it does help to leave them in the mold longer but with all the waiting already it's very hard to tell your son to wait another 2 hours for mold to harden fully. You can try putting it in the fridge or into cold water to speed things up, but this didn't seem to help much. Time and patience is what's required which children struggle with at the best of times. If you are lucky enough to get the bug out in a reasonable state you then have to 'cut around' it' This involves using a useless plastic knife and going in and out of all the legs one at a time, trying your best (and mostly failing) to avoid pulling or cutting any of the bug legs off.
Out of the 4 molds, 2 of them you can add Bug Goo! You have to place a long plastic core into the mold to enable you to add the goo after the bug has set. Here lies another problem. If you leave it in too long it's an absolute nightmare to try to get the thing out of the bug. It just doesn't budge and certainly a child of 7 wouldn't be able to pull it out. So you pull and twist and pull and twist and eventually it comes out, but you've made a complete mess of the bug in so doing. So you can try the second method which is taking it out earlier before the bug has set fully. This is much easier to do, but unfortunately the majority of the bug mold comes away with it when you use this method, leaving a big hole with no possibility of filling it with anything.
My son lost interest and eventually it went up onto his bedroom shelf and there it has sat until he started seeing the adverts again recently. So back out it came. However, and this is the real killer, it now doesn't work at all. We've tried new batteries but it just doesn't heat up. The power light slowly fades and nothing happens. You still sit there hoping it's heating up, but after 30 mins you realise that it's just not working. I've checked on-line and this is a common problem with this product, so in the bin it'll go. What a waste of money. We made a total of 5 bugs (if you can call them that)before this broke. Only 1, I would consider a success.

Before I go, my son would like to say a few words :-
'This toy is completely awful. Don't buy this toy, it is a disgrace. I would rather buy a doll.'

So summing up, please please, do not buy this. Try and persuade your child into having something else for xmas. If they insist, you can't go too wrong with showing them the reviews of this product on this page.

Hope this has helped.

We keep watching the ads, it all looks great until it comes out the box and doesn't work.

If it hadn't been for the tried and tested Nintendo DS my kids christmas would have been ruined.

Avoid at all costs.....