Now just the other day I posted on here an infographic which told us that Zhu Zhu Pets were one of the toys of the decade from the 2010s. I’m using the fact that Little Miss C was only just born in 2010 as my excuse for why I hadn’t played with Zhu Zhu Pets until very recently. They are exactly the sort of toy that LMC absolutely loves though and so I scored some serious mum brownie points when I opened a large cardboard box to reveal a selection of the latest range of them.
Inside we unpacked the Hamster House Playset and an Adventure Ball as well as Pipsqueak, one of the Zhu Zhu Pets hamsters. The Hamster House Playset comes with a second hamster which mean that it was perfect for the children to adopt a hamster each to play with. The hamsters themselves are cute little interactive creatures. With sensors on their nose, their heads and their backs they respond in different ways when touched in the various places and can also navigate their way around. Each hamster is unique in the way it behaves.
First thing’s first though and we needed to get the playset and adventure ball assembled and to be honest this is were its grown ups nearly cane unstuck. Between us we have several engineering qualifications yet we seemed tried struggle for ages to get the adventure ball to click into place. The instructions simply saying “snap the two interlocking halves of the ball together ” didn’t really help much. In fairness, there are letters on both halves to help you line it up the way it should go, but it still took us a while to actually get it to snap together.
The Hamster House Playset also provided a few challenges, but mainly because I didn’t initially notice the letters telling you how to align it all. One of the pictures was also a little mysterious, but looking at the picture on the box helped us realise that it was referring to the bits you place in the other two exits from the main play arena. What I would suggest though is that if you’re buying these as a present, especially at Christmas, then you might want to consider assembling them in advance. The very good news though is that, unlike many toys that I’ve reviewed recently, Zhu Zhu Pets actually come with batteries included. Each hamster takes 2 AAA batteries and it was such a relief not to have to go and raid other toys for batteries before being able to turn them on.
The kids absolutely loved the Zhu Zhu Pets hamsters once we’d got them up and running. They had great fun with them in the hamster house playset as well as letting them run loose around the flat. In true hamster style, one of them managed to get lost under the sofa within a matter of seconds, but luckily it wasn’t as difficult to track down as real hamsters are!
In the Hamster House playset they quite easily found the way out of the main area and then up the slope to the spiral ramp down. Master C kept getting his hamster to repeat this over and over again.
The Adventure Ball stopped the hamster from disappearing under the sofa quite so much, but it took me a little while to work out that the extra piece of plastic in the box was to attach to the bottom of the Zhu Zhu Pets hamster so that he didn’t end up on his side inside the Adventure Ball. He actually looked quite realistic scurrying around the living room floor in the ball.
Before long the two hamsters were happily at home in the playset and Little Miss C was also busy designing a bedroom for them that she is planning to build out of cardboard over the weekend – complete with bunk beds for them to sleep in. Because hamsters sleep in bunk beds. Obviously!
Disclaimer: We were sent the Zhu Zhu Pets items detailed above for the purposes of this review. All opinions remain my own. This post contains affiliate links.
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