I recently picked up the Pegasus Hobbies Syberclicks modular terrain kit to use in a project. It’s an interesting kit designed to allow you to build a variety scifi style buildings using snap together construction. Theoretically, that should result in a versatile set of parts that you can quickly build terrain with, and change the designs anytime you like. In practice, it does not work quite as well as advertised.
The set consists of six identical sprues of molded metallic grey plastic. The set consists of a variety of steel panels, grates, ladders, hatches, and some gothic windows. Everything is laid out so all the parts can be clipped and assembled with minimal cleanup. There are very few mold lines and the parts all have excellent details. Everything feels solid and looks great on the sprue.
The set comes with a minimal instruction sheet that covers two sides of a piece of paper. The instruction sheet really feels like an afterthought, but all the pieces are fairly self-explanatory and easy to identify and use without them. Its primary purpose is to point out the connector pieces and show a basic diagram of the part layout for the building pictured on the box front.
Those connectors are where the problem starts with the kit. There are five types in the set, and assuming they worked as designed, they should give you plenty of options on how you construct your buildings. Unfortunately, they do not work as designed. The various panels are solid; the connectors on the other hand are very fragile. They also clip very tightly, which tends to result in broken clips when you try to snap pieces together. Even when they do manage to survive the process of clipping them onto a panel, they tend to pop loose when trying to attach additional pieces.
I constructed the small building below from a single sprue. It looks decent considering how few parts I used on it, but I ended up breaking six connector pieces in the process. It also took me over an hour to get it assembled because parts kept popping off and I launched a few connectors across the room. When I do build something with these parts I will be gluing them together.
I really like the look of all the panels and other parts in the kit. I should be able to use the parts for a variety of purposes on future projects, and the fact that there are six sprues gives me a lot to work with. Unfortunately, it fails to be the easy to assemble snap together kit the box advertises. For twenty dollars, the kit gives you plenty of great parts to work with at a great price, but if you are looking for an easy to assemble modular terrain kit you might want to look elsewhere.
