Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My 7 yr old daughter loves math and Star Wars, so I thought this would be a great Christmas toy and STEM activity. It took her about an hour to build R2D2. The app software walks you through each step and is very easy to follow, but I could only download the app on my iPhone 7 which runs iOS 10, it was not compatible with her iPad 2 which runs iOS 9. This was problematic later when she wanted to play with the droid, as she always had to use my phone to do it. R2D2 has very cool sounds and even a drawing function, which she loved. It was easy to maneuver and interact with. It has several "missions" that you can do with the robot like an obstacle course. Though some missions you have to pay to unlock in the app, which I thought was annoying after I paid $100 for the robot. The shell of the robot is also very fragile. One piece or another would fall off daily, and I ended up having to help her snap it back together. Just carrying it from one room to another could cause it to fall apart. At first, I accepted it as part of the "I built my own robot" engineer experience, but by day 3 this was just annoying. Ultimately, after 2 weeks of using R2D2 maybe 30 mins a day, one of the motors failed and the droid would no longer move. I spent about an hour troubleshooting including reassembling the circuits, replacing the battery, and looking online at the customer support forums but got nowhere. Given that the robot has flimsy construction, the motor failed so quickly, and she could not operate it on her own with her iPad, I returned it and we got a cheaper, pre-built R2D2 robot.