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A closer look at the Mega Construx Havoc Staff

Mega Construx, the teen and adult-focused portion of Mega Bloks, has been pumping out some interesting buildable toys based on He-Man and the best of the bunch may be this: the Masters of the Universe Havoc Staff.

Yes this is Skeletor’s famous purple staff adorned with what looks to be a skull of a horned animal.

This set comes with an impressive 741 pieces that becomes even more impressive once built. While not intended to be a 1:1 scale replica, the finished staff measures in at 1.02 metres making it incredibly imposing both on display and to play around with.

Before we take a proper look at the finished staff let’s go back in time to the unboxing and building experience.

The box of the Havoc Staff is of a rather high quality with a unique opening mechanism. Once inside the staff is broken up into multiple bags which you will assemble using the included instruction book. There’s no stickers or decals to apply here, just lots of bricks.

The build is really fun with the skull at the top of the staff being especially satisfying to put together. There are some boring times here, notably the handle section of the staff, but it’s still a good time overall.

This is easy enough to make and anyone unfamiliar with building block sets should still be able to get through it without problems.

Of final note is the bricks themselves. It may look like a flat purple colour most of the time but if you look closely the plastic is actually mottled with little silver flecks.

It’s difficult to capture on camera so click here to see our best attempt. The effect works better in person and it adds a lot of dimensionality to the build which would otherwise look more flat and lifeless with simple purple bricks alone.

The Havoc Staff with a regular 30 centimetre ruler.

The quality of the plastic in these bricks is really solid too. Mega Construx obviously has a lot of competition in the world of brick built toys but you’re not left wanting when it comes to the solidness of these pieces.

Purple can also be a difficult choice for toys as different elements can be hard to colour match, but all of the pieces in the set we got were both perfectly coloured and formed.

Once finished the staff is easy to handle and mess around with but some elements can be fragile, especially those horns which we clipped on a wall and had to rebuild after breaking off and falling to the ground.

If you’re careful and treat the build with some care it should be stable enough most of the time.

The huge size makes this an imposing display piece that won’t shatter when you want to take it off from a shelf to show visitors.

We showed the final build to some family and friends and most were surprised by the fact that it’s made up of bricks and is so sturdy and, of course, the He-Man fans loved it (though they did ask if we could build a Power Sword next).

In terms of price and the value of this product, the RRP of the Havoc Staff is R999.

That being said it can be found for less with Takealot (R865), Toy Kingdom (R919), Loot (R919) and a few others selling it for less at the time of publication.

You’d be hard pressed to find a prop of this size – buildable or not – for the same price or cheaper in South Africa.

Considering that you get the added experience of actually building the Havoc Staff and we think this is priced rather well.

After a lot of time spent with the Havoc staff building, messing around with it, showing it off and finally putting it on display, it comes with two thumbs up from us.

He-Man fans will obviously love that it comes from the franchise but we can honestly see a lot of non-fans enjoying it too as a weird magical staff that you get to build.

The inevitable LEGO comparison

It’s impossible to talk about about any brick building product without mentioning LEGO but we’ve avoided it until now.

LEGO does offer a vaguely similar product to the Mega Construx Havoc Staff, but the massive price difference makes this comparison moot.

The large scale weapon that LEGO offers is Mjölnir, Thor’s hammer, in the form of set number 76209.

With 979 pieces the finished hammer, which you can see here compared to the Havoc Staff, is much shorter but makes up for that in massive width.

The hammer also comes with a small display stand and a minifigure of Thor.

For this set LEGO is asking for R2 099 in South Africa, which is more than double the price of the Mega Construx Havoc Staff.

Because of this the two can’t be compared and we only mention it as it’s the closest product that LEGO makes that can be considered similar to the staff.

As mentioned above the quality of the packaging, plastic, instructions and everything else is just about on par with LEGO too, so in the end it really comes down to who you are and if you’re more of a fan of either franchise that these products recommend. And, of course, price.

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