This year’s City line-up so far really isn’t that great. What functionality has been added by the inclusion of Light & Sound bricks, parachutes and fake water guns has unfortunately been done so at the cost of overall parts count and complexity of the models. Naturally, as the respective LEGO magazines are tie-ins to this stuff, it even shows here.
While the last issue focused on the police side of things, this time it’s the firefighters that get their due. The minifigure is actually okay with its reasonably realistic details even for a European firefighter (except the helmet), but the buildable extra otherwise leaves a lot to be desired. It matches the “burning” Octan fuel barrels found in some of the sets with the flames being on a round disc totally separate. This is supposed to topple down if you blow at it or otherwise “extinguish” the flames by moving them out of the way. Not particularly interesting. If they had at least decked out fully on the “flames” parts for better density…
The comic is nice. I feel that the focus on longer stories spread across more pages and using larger panels makes them a lot more enjoyable, be it just for inspecting the visual details. Granted, still nothing that will go down in literary history, but enough to keep your kids busy for a while. Even the main protagonist is something you can relate to. The posters aren’t very interesting and as someone who has done this for more than twenty years I even detected some “bad CGI” with straight edges of the geometry approximation showing where they should be perfectly round.
By any measure, for a person beyond a certain age this is a very skipable issue unless you really want the minifigure to bolster your squad if you have bought one of the sets and even then I’m not sure. When I was very little we used to get more fun out of toying around with little camp fires or watching our parents and grandparents stoop the fire in the coal oven/ stove… Anyway, the next mag will have a little lawnmower tractor, which looks a lot more interesting to me, so I’m looking forward to that.
Mylenium's Brick Corner 