It has become standard practice for the LEGO City magazines to go for a dive in the summer-ish editions and this year is not an exception. Yes, pretty much exactly after one year we are getting another underwater-centric issue featuring a diver.
The overall repetitive nature of the subject matter notwithstanding, the story of the comic is okay, though again perhaps a bit too wacky and overstuffed for its own good. I find it hard to imagine how kids are supposed to keep the story straight. You’re on a sunny beach one moment, then suddenly underwater and then there is a weird twist with a big horseshoe magnet. not my kettle of fish, no pun intended.
On the bright side, the oceanic scenes look great and I’m really waiting for someone at Blue Ocean and LEGO to see the light and use those for a poster one day.
Speaking of which… The posters are acceptable and in fact the one on the reverse page is probably even better than the one shown here. Outside that there’s not much to do bar the usual super simplistic puzzles and some promotional pages on sets and some minifigures’ “history”, but I guess you’re not buying this mag for intellectual content.
The diver is interesting in that it appears to be a completely new figure so far not yet contained in any set. Its design is similar to the older Deep Sea Explorer series, but with some notable differences, so I don’t quite know what to make of it. It would be funny if LEGO put out a figure before it was ever properly introduced in a full set. The rest isn’t really worth mentioning. It would have been much cooler if instead of the old and overused big crab they had included the hermit crab from last year’s collectible minifigure series at least.
As far as “summer editions” go, this one is okay, but of course nowhere near as impressive as the one with shark last year. On a general note it seems they should mix up the formula a bit. Clearly there’s enough summer and outdoor activities they can borrow from and from having a guy sunbathing at the beach to the highly desirable swimming innertube to an ice stand there would be so much to choose from. There’s even a good chance people would be perfectly content with the printed “can” or the wheelchair skater from the Skate Park (60290). You know, just something different at all…
Mylenium's Brick Corner 