We got the ‘Fantasy’ themed April 2015 Loot Crate earlier than expected! It was shipped earlier in the week and all the tracking information that we were given told us that we would be receiving it on the 21st. To our surprise it arrived on the 18th! Good job FedEx and the US Postal Service!

We immediately remarked how compact it was when compared with a few of the previous boxes. Did this have any significant impact of the quality of the box? Do big things come in little packages?

A little bit of concern crept into our pea sized brains as we set out to open this relatively small box. Once the seal had been broken and the crate opened we were met with a number of different items that, for the most part, didn’t really seem to fit together well thematically.

Dungeons & Dragons and…uh…The Princess Bride

The first thing to grab your attention is the bright red Dungeons & Dragons shirt as it was neatly folded and on top of everything else so you couldn’t see the rest of the contents. This was followed by a deck of ‘The Princess Bride’ playing cards and a Dungeons & Dragons clip on bow tie. Now, I’m not one to knock ‘The Princess Bride’ but getting a set of playing cards from a movie that was originally released in 1987 was a little strange.

Game of Thrones USB Stick

Next out of the box was some USB storage. I’m a computer weenie so you’ll never see me turn down more storage. The nice thing about this was that it was 4GB. That’s a decent amount of space to have on hand. The dire wolf plastic casing was pretty nice, too. The plastic didn’t feel cheap and the styling was very nicely done.

More Wearables

Next in the box you got two more wearables: An inflatable crown and the Loot Crate Button. Neither one of these was especially intriguing. The crown was definitely fashioned for someone with a small head. Let out a little air and it fits comfortably on an adult head.

Harry Potter Bag Tag

This was the big winner in the box. When my niece saw this beneath all the other merchandise she was pretty excited. What was next was the Harry Potter Bag Tag. All the Harry Potter geeks would be all sorts of buzzing around about this. The tag is a very decent quality of plastic/rubber representing platform 9 3/4. On the back of the tag you write in your name and address. It didn’t seem like much but when a 10 year old is happy and excited to reach into the box to pull out the Potter themed treasure then you know it must be good.

Loot Crate Magazine and The Box

Finally, we came to the very bottom of the box – the Loot Crate Magazine. As usual, it was filled with short articles, adverts for the Epic Crate and descriptions of all the goodies. The box itself didn’t offer much of a surprise like last week’s ‘Covert’ box.

Final Thoughts

To be honest, I’m still not sure how I feel about the Loot Crate. Sometimes it’s great and I feel like the experience satiated the geek in me. Other times, such as with this box, I feel like the thought behind it wasn’t complete. Almost like the NerdBlock Classic that we reviewed last month. When you see an image like this on the website

You feel like you’ll get Orcs and elves and epic sword fights and dragons and magic and potions. Instead, what you got was a hodge podge of items that seem to have been thrown together because they were related by the weakest of threads.

I REALLY want to like Loot Crate. Crates like this April 2015 box really don’t engage me and make me feel like wanting more. That was the cool thing about comic books when I was growing up: you know you’re getting one next month but you don’t know what you’re going to get so you get all excited about a story and you can’t wait for the next month’s comic. That’s what I should be feeling about these crates. Last month’s ‘Covert’ crate was engaging and thought provoking and drew the subscriber in.

Maybe this was just a bad case of April Fools :/