Do all Mega Blok toys stink?

In My Humble Opinion
1

As usual this year, I wandered down the Lego aisle at the toy store and stopped to admire the gorgeous Mega Blok sets that are displayed directly across from the Lego(s). This year they’re pushing a very cool-looking Pirates of the Carribean set. They also have a newer version of the Dragons set.

A few years ago I fell in love with the Mega Blok Dragons collection at the store, and bought several sets for my son for Christmas. The pieces in the box were beautiful, and the castle it could have made would have been pretty spectacular. I say could have made - because it turned out to be nearly impossible to assemble the thing. The blocks simply wouldn’t stick together. My son tried, my husband and I tried, and we all gave up in frustration. The set has been sitting around for years in a box, and just last week I dumped the whole thing in a garbage bag and threw it out.

I know the idea is that Mega Bloks are cheaper than Lego, but how can they sell them at all if they’re so completely useless? Did I simply have bad luck? If they even approached the quality of Lego I would buy them and be willing to pay more for them. I have certainly given Lego enough of my money over the years.

2

The pieces seem to be of inferior quality to Lego, but there’s really no good reason why they should be - it’s just injection moulded plastic fercryinoutloud - the expense of Lego is almost nothing to do with difficulty of manufacture.

But Lego itself has gone downhill a bit in recent years - moving away from being a simple multi-purpose construction toy composed of highly configurable sets of components; towards single-purpose sets with large, not-very-reusable pieces.
I tend to buy it second hand now because so many of the new sets are just not worth the money. You do have to be careful though, because second-hand collections often contain a proportion of mega bloks and other off brands, and yes, they’re not as good.