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While grandma gifted Lyons Cub a day each at Legoland and SeaLife in the city of Oberhausen for Easter, mommy offered him his secret (or not so secret) wish: the shark color shifter from Hot Wheels!!! He had been talking about it for some time, after seeing it advertised on YouTube, and it makes the perfect addition to his Hot Wheels City components like the green slime gorilla, the toxic slime snake, and the humongeous Robo-T-Rex parking garage.
The set is rather small, and you need to fill the square reservoir with icy water (we inserted some ice cubes to keep it really cold) and the big, blue lake with the waterfall with hot water. The set comes with only one shape-shifting car, which is orange and turns white when it comes from cold into hot water. When standing around at room temperature, it switches back to orange after some time.
Even grandma had fun switching colors!! Just make sure you have some towels handy 😉
You have to race your car up the orange ramp, lower it into the ice water, raise it with the elevator to the brown race track, and let it run down through the shark’s mouth into the hot water pool. Sometimes, the shark will eject the car sideways, because a mechanism snaps. The shark doesn’t chomp down on it, though.
I bought Lyons Cub five more cars, so he could observe some more color changes, and they were the hit with him. Just mind that other color-shifting cars might be too high to be submerged in the blue basin, such as the high fire-engine; in that case, your kid just needs to turn the car around in the warm water, so it gets wet from all sides. The orange car it came with fits perfectly in the water dish. The red fire-engine turns white, the green van turns yellow, the blue race car turns gray, the purple SUV turns dark blue, and the red race car turns orange.
Next time, we’ll play outside with this toy. Count on your floor getting wet! Maybe a tray underneath would work, too. Apart from this, it’s a very recommendable toy for little kids and fun for the whole family. The color-shifting cars are not cheap, though.