This puzzle, while I love the distinct idea that it's attempting to evoke, fails extraordinarily in letting such be experienced by the user. I struggled to scramble the puzzle, solved a small portion, and put it down once I realized that further progress presupposed a type of experimentation that I simply was not willing to endure. Compared to the other two reviews that are posted at the time I have submitted this one, it could be that my resolve to push past poor turning is lower than that of those reviewers. The quality of turning is on par with the 2005 Rubik's brand 3x3 puzzle, but not quite as stiff, which enables layers to misalign much easier during the process of cranking turns. I am confident, however, that the puzzle could be modified to ease the turning, but doing so would require disassembling the puzzle. Frankly, I fear to wrestle with putting back together whatever mechanism causes a puzzle to turn so abysmally. So, if daunting puzzle modifications are your cup of tea, then this puzzle would make for a nice challenge.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this puzzle. I think that conceptually the puzzle is great. I love having a stickerless octahedral puzzle that solves similarly to a 4x4 cube. Since octahedrons are dual to cubes, all the normal algorithms you would use for a 4x4 still basically work, but the differences in coloring (eaqch "center" of this puzzle is a vertex and has four different colors) make for a different and interesting solve. Best of all, there's no need to worry about parity issues at the end. Even if you solve it traditionally using reduction, you can swap edges very easily because unlike the normal 4x4 cube each edge piece has 2 identical counterparts that it can be swapped with. So as long as you know the basics of how to use commutators and conjugation you can get around parity issues easily.

Now for the bad. This puzzle is one of the worst turning puzzles in my collection. It seriously feels as bad as the old school Rubik's brand puzzles. I took it apart and the mechanism is super awkward, making it so that you have to have things perfectly aligned to like, a tenth of a millimeter in order to turn. Now, I know this is a non-WCA puzzle so I'm not expecting corner cutting or anything, but I feel like I often struggle with this thing for half a minute just to get one turn. It's not all the time, some of layers turn pretty well. But it's enough that it makes me reluctant to take this puzzle out to solve even though I really enjoy solving it.

In the end I'm glad I bought this and have enjoyed solving it. But I really wish the turning wasn't so painfully bad. I hope that one day LanLan will revisit this and take a look at the mechanisms on some of the better 4x4 cubes in order to engineer a better version.

Very fun puzzle, looks great, feels good in quality, nice size - but the turning isn't that great. It's good enough where you could solve it without too much frustration, but definitely not like a speed cube. I knew what the turning would be like before I bought it, so I'm happy with it.

I haven't experienced what the 3 other people have. Mine turns at like a 7/10, it's just catchy not stuff at all. I've scrambled it and look forward to the solve. Learning the color scheme might be annoying but otherwise should be fun!

This is probably one of my favorite puzzles right now. This puzzle is simply a shapemod of a 4x4 cube, where the corners of the octahedron act as the faces of the 4x4. I've figured out a couple ways of solving it using only the algs associated with the 4x4 reduction method, but there are likely better solutions out there that avoid the dreaded 4x4 OLL parity. However, the fun solve that this puzzle offers is undercut heavily by its frequent lockups. There is virtually zero corner cutting on this thing, so if any layer is even slightly misaligned, you won't be able to make a turn. This can lead to some frustrating moments losing your place in algs and such. I've had no problems with popping, though, and lubing with DNM 37 and lubicle silk seems to have helped the locking problem somewhat.

Overall, I think the good in this puzzle outweighs the irritating locking issue and would absolutely recommend it at this price.