I had a great experience with Intrism Pro, and I’d recommend this to anyone with a LOT of patience and a great knack for these sorts dexterity puzzles.
I spent around 15 or so hours building the Intrism, split over 2 days. It was great fun and the manual was super easy to understand with nice building diagrams, tips to help you work out how to push each piece in, and icons to tell you if that piece is delicate, reversible, or if it has a spare in he included spare sheet (yes—a spare sheet is a sign of a truly honest company!). Also, the connecting “fingers” and their respective slots in neighboring pieces are different-sized, meaning you can’t fool the build and it is never confusing. However, those fingers are SO tight, most of the time I had to carefully hammer them in while avoiding breaking anything, or, with the (highly useful) included sandpaper, sand down the little things at the sides to make ‘em slip in easier.
After having finished building the wooden maze, I tested it with the included marble, and it occasionally wouldn’t fit through certain holes like the nose-shaped one from step 5. Looking closer, I noticed that the marble was slightly misshapen and oval-shaped! Yes, that’s right: the marble was very slightly OVAL! So instead, I used my own 1/2-inch steel marble of a similar size but was perfectly round. As it turned out, this worked about 10 times better: it fitted perfectly through all holes in the maze, and, as it was a little heavier, gave me a little more control in those drop sections as it didn’t bounce around so much.
And then, the most tedious bit of the building process came: assembling the acrylic casing! Doing that wasn’t the main challenge though—it was peeling the film off both sides of all 6 panels. And boy, was that annoying. The film wasn’t clear or blue plastic as the manual had said, but rather extremely sticky and easily ripped paper. It always ripped when I tried to peel it off, especially at sticky-out bits like the tabs that lock each panel in place, which, believe me, was INSANELY annoying. And I had to do 12. Twelve! So please be warned—you need a LOTTA patience for this. (If the film was plastic, making it less easy to rip, I may have considered giving Intrism Pro 5 stars. I really couldn’t stand that step.)
In terms of playing with the actual maze itself, boy, was it a HUGE challenge. The Intrism website got it right—it is VERY MUCH a level 10 maze. I’ve completed Perplexus Epic (a very hard maze game with a similar idea at around level 9) several times, but I can’t get far in this one at all. Believe me, you may wanna prepare your best curse words for this game. So, if you’re a newbie and just getting into the world of 3D mazes, I think you oughta get an easy Perplexus first, or if you’re looking for a DIY one, the Intrism Mini or Level One.
This difficulty might prove to be a problem for most people, as the acrylic casing is weakly held together by some tabs and slots that all interlock in a pattern. Most of the people I’ve challenged with this (and me too) tended to shake or hit it when they got frustrated, leading it to falling apart, forcing me to get back onto my workspace to try and put it together again, which also proves quite annoying. Even worse, they’re acrylic, which means they crack quite easily! This pretty weak (and not too well-designed) casing is one of the prime reasons I didn’t give Intrism Pro 5 stars.
At the very end of the build, they give you a stand that you can assemble from a few wooden pieces from the extra sheet. Don’t bother with it—it just can’t hold up the massive Intrism. I left it on that stand for a while, and when I came back, the Intrism fell off and the outer casing fell apart!
Overall, I really enjoyed Intrism Pro and will be looking out for more wooden DIY mazes from this awesome company. Hope you found my (extra-long) review helpful, and thanks for reading :)