Well, it's up and it's in use. My kids 3-9 love and use every part of it (except we are not using the fire pole). The manual was effective, only a few pieces were not stickered with there letter code to indicate we had the correct part for the next step, which we could easily figure out. There was tons of plastic wrap on everything, but this was important to keeping the coating from scratching off, so necessary. I love that we got this product. My 9 yr old can stand in the center of the tower, however there is lots of ducking to get into the upper and lower zones. The sturdiness is what we wanted and so far we expect it will be for many years...tbd.