The Pirates of the Caribbean Black Pearl Pirate Ship is available as end-of-line stock from a few places for a bargain price these days. The Bargain Warehouse have it on sale for only £45 as their normal selling price! When this was new in the shops, it retailed for nearly £100 and that doesn't include any figures even.

The box that this comes in is absolutely huge. It's about a meter long, and a good size round. There's quite a lot of assembly that goes into this, unfortunately, so you have to be prepared to put in a good hour of construction time before this toy is ready to be played with.

There are some reasons for the construction being so necessary, including lots of special additional features. This ship has got lots of great interactive features included such as a trap door or two, lots of windows, doors and cells that open, and little cannons that actually fire. There's also a few sections of ship that open up, and some dualling discs too. To use the duelling discs, you just stand a couple of characters on them, and spin the cogs that poke out of the side of the ship to make the characters appear to really duel. On top of that, if you put some batteries in, you can get lots of little sound effects from the various buttons around the helm too. The sound effects are all in clear, reasonably loud authentic pirate accents which I thought was good.

There are absolutely loads of features included in this ship, and although £45 sounds like a lot of money, it's actually a very reasonable price for a large play set that comes with as many features and special functions as this does. There are definitely a good few drawbacks to consider though, the first of which is that you have to buy the characters seperately. Thankfully these can be picked up quite cheaply since the theme has declined in popularity, but you do have to look around (especially to places like ebay).

Also, the nets that attach to the mast will just not stay together at all, and one of the masts doesn't want to stay erect. If you want these bits to stay put, you have to glue them, and this then means that you can't fully disassemble the toy to put it away. As it's such a big toy, this is a bit annoying. You really want to be able to break it into parts and put it away after use, and you can't do that if you've glued it can you?

Other than that, this is a lovely play set that offers amazing value for money. I think most little boys between about six and ten years would be thrilled to receive this as a present. It's definitely not for younger tots due to all the small, fiddly parts involved, and all the special features will make it a playset that hopefully appeals to the slightly older child. Really this deserves three and a half stars, so I've gone for four to err on the generous side. For the price, you can't grumble a lot even if you use it with the mast down.