The plastic hilt makes this safe for kids play.
The blade is a bit too long for indoor play if you have limited space (live in a cramped apartment). It would be a good idea to offer a slightly shorter blade as an option.
There are no assembly instructions on how to assemble the hilt with the blade. You get a bag of screws. I used the two long screws and none of the short ones. I removed the cap on the blade before inserting it into the hilt.
You do get dis-assembly instructions for the hilt though, weird.
The manual specifies you need to use an USB-C charger with max 1A, which no chargers have. Normal chargers are about 2.4A.
The highest powered USB sockets on a computer offer 0.9A, so that is what we have been using.
I did google this and found an article that showed a table with data from tests run on multiple sabers and that they all charged just fine on 2.4A chargers and drew the same amount of power as they did on 1A (so no fire hazard found in those tests). That article said that the manual claiming that 1A is the limit is probably because there could in theory be some non-standard fast charger that could cause problems. If that is the case, then please change the manual to say that instead.
That way people could actually use normal chargers with their sabers. In the meantime, I'm sticking with the 0.9A charging.
The charging port rubber cover broke off almost immediately on both sabers (the kids did it, not sure if an adult would have). On the silver colored sabers we have, losing the charging port cover does not make the saber look terrible, so not a big issue. Will probably look slightly worse on the gold saber.
One of the sabers have the internals slightly rotated, meaning the charging port opening and button are not 100% aligned and fail to operate sometimes. This could perhaps be fixed by a disassembly and reassembly.
The single button operation for everything takes some getting used to, but is ok in the end.
One of our two sabers failed to change color many times in a row. The saber would talk and say "color change", but then nothing happened. The saber was stuck white.
It did eventually resolve itself.
When you turn off the lights, the sabers look awesome and most of the sound effects sound great. Even in daylight, the sabers light up pretty well. Towards the tip the lighting is not evenly distributed, it looks like a small unlit ring where the tip starts to narrow. This is the case with the RGB-version at least, but as I understand it, the RGB-version is more durable, so a good choise for kids.
I know I mentioned some issues, but overall I do recommend buying this. It seems to be the only option if you want to buy a durable good quality saber from a reputable manufacturer that kids can play with.
