So next up on my list of recovered sets from my youth is 6330: Cargo Center. As with almost every single set in the Town Jr. lineup, let me get this disclaimer out of the way first: This set's got plenty wrong with it. The cancer that is juniorisation has infected this set as it did basically every set from 1997 through 2002-ish. There are a ton of huge prefabricated pieces that should be a bunch of smaller pierces, and the set follows the standard for the time "massive amount of playability, extremely low realism" paradigm Lego designers used for the time.

THAT ALL BEING SAID, it really isn't *that* bad. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's one of the better Town Jr. sets and still looks pretty good in your Lego town to this day, should you have such a thing. As anyone who's read anything I've reviewed before knows, I'm a massive sucker for Lego sets that model things that aren't the standard "police/fire/construction" templates that Lego is to this day obsessed with endlessly releasing and re-releasing. As a child I always got a bigger kick out of modeling things I would see in my day to day life instead of more extraordinary things like movie tie-ins or space stations. Growing up and still living to this day in the far west Texas border region, importing and exporting businesses are quite common, cargo transport is a big thing and semis, cargo terminals, and shipping businesses are something I grew up around, so obviously when preteen me found out Lego was making a set modeling such a thing I had to have it.

The end result is, well, honestly not that bad. The buildings are functional and attractive, the large cargo pickup looks great, the helicopter's a very unique design, and the two smaller bonus vehicles are late 90's bad Lego design trash as is expected for the time period. That being said, all in all there's a lot to like here, with the downside that this set was and still is massively, massively overpriced. As always I'll review the individual components seperately as Lego divided them up in their instruction manuals.

The Helicopter: The late nineties spawned countless Town helicopters, it seems Lego put one in almost every set they released. This one is actually one of the nicer, more interestingly designed ones of the Town Jr. lot. It sort of resembles something like a Chinook helicopter, or some other huge heavy-duty transportation helicopter, which is really neat because it's something new. I dig that it has wheels instead of skids like most other helicopters of the period. The way the controls are attached to the windshield is clever, and there is a ton of room in it to haul whatever Cargo your preteen mind can think of it needing to deliver. The spotlight in front of it is a cool detail as well. The helicopter's enormous, maybe even a bit out of scale (It's almost two stories tall compared to the cargo building!), but for a heavy duty transporter I suppose I can let that slide. Obviously having a helicopter have no side walls is incredibly unrealistic but the playability is quite high which is what they're going for so it doesn't bother me too much. That being said, just a handful of 1x6 yellow bricks is all it takes to give it side walls and make it look really nice and realistic in your town layout. I also dig how the included cargo containers fit *perfectly* inside of the bed of this thing. I'm a sucker for details.

The Pickup: Again, the included cargo containers (2x2 wide blue container bricks with flap openings) fit absolutely perfect in the truck bed. This truck has a roof, a rarity for the Town Jr. lineup, so that's appreciated of course. it has a nice heavy-duty appearance to it, like a large cargo transporter should have, and the "box with arrows" logo on the sides of it look really attractive. Unlike most Town Jr. vehicles, this one actually does resemble what it's supposed to, so I really like this thing. It's an attractive design that you can easily replicate using generic pieces to bulk up your cargo fleet. As a side note, the lone other Town Jr. cargo set (the package delivery pickup one) scales excellently with this entire set and has a neat appearance of being something like a small, short distance delivery vehicle while this one looks more long distance.

The Cargo Office: For some reason this building is separated from its garage, and there isn't anything attaching the two units. If this bothers you as it does me, you can swap the 2x6 white brick under the computer assembly for the pair of 1x6 white bricks on top of the walls, and put the 2x6 one between the two baseplates, keeping the two buildings nice and even and level. The office building it the best of the two and has a lot of nice details. The exclusive office manager minifig looks right at home on the computer console in the upper office keeping track of his employees, the computer next to the loading bay looks good and can rotate for a more realistic appearance, and I really like the double red light entrance/exit gate. Very cool detail there. The pair of loudspeakers on the roof are an excellent touch. For being one of the Town Jr. sets that basically amounts to "three walls and some computers" this set actually looks pretty realistic from the front and the building doesn't look out of place next to other buildings at all. I know the lack of fourth walls bother some people but I never minded. It'd be extremely difficult to pose the figures and actually play with the thing if the whole assembly was walled off.

The Garage: Much unlike a lot of period Town sets, this loading dock actually does look like something you'd expect a large business to have, it's elevated high enough your minifigures can load cargo into a parked truck bed, and there is space inside of it for vehicles (again, like separate package pick-up set) to park and have their beds loaded. There are an absolute ton of extra small details included with this part of the set, such as crates full of tools, packages full of computers, silverware, and accessories to ship, and even a barrel for your intrepid cargo workers to transport. The overhead lights look appropriately heavy-duty and the method of storing the handcart on a hinge plate I still think is genius.

The Octan Tanker Car: Oh boy, now to the bad parts. Every single large Lego set of the time had to throw in some added value tiny vehicles, and much like the car in #6464 or the sad attempt at a tow truck in Octan Gas Station, the two included with this set are the worst parts of the set by a longshot. This is the better of the two but it's still not great. It's a chassis with a steering wheel, rollbar (in front of the wheel this time... for some reason) and a reasonably good looking gas tank on the back. The included hose brick looks fine and you can use it to pretend to refuel your vehicles, but I can't help but think that with a larger chassis and any more details at all added to it this piece would look better.

The Forklift: I promise you, absolutely promise you, that a small child could design a better forklift than this. It's a blue chassis with two slope bricks, a forklift prefab piece, and a steering wheel. That's it. The side effect of it being so barebones is that it has absolutely no counterweight if you actually want to pick up something with the forklift assembly. Anything you put in the forks will cause the thing to become front heavy and tip over due to the fact that there is literally nothing but a single 2x2 slope brick on the back of this thing. It needs a redesign to be even moderately functional and useful and I assure you anyone can redesign it better than what's included. Shame too, it would've been a nice addition had it had even a second's worth of effort added to it.

Building Experience: It's fine, nothing special, but fine. A few neat building techniques are used (namely the method of mounting the hand-cart and the fact that all the cargo pieces included have a little place they fit), but it's a late nineties town set, so way too much prefab. Graded on the curve you kinda have to grade these things on, it's just fine.

Parts: No matter how much you may hate the extremely simplistic, juniorised nature of the 1997-2002 Town Jr. lineup, you have to admit the parts selection on them is pretty fantastic, and this is no exception. Tons of rare, exclusive, and otherwise difficult to find and useful parts in this, so that even if you don't like the set you can re-build it into something more your style.

In this set's case, there are a TON of printed "CARGO" bricks you can't get anywhere else that are great for making a MOC cargo center that's a little less juniorised than this. The small smooth double wheel assemblies used on the helicopter are rare and useful, the minifigure printed "CARGO" torsos are exclusive to this set, there are a ton of printed (always printed with Town Jr, one of the big upsides to the whole fiasco) computer bricks both sloped and vertical. Two flowers included, which you can never have enough of, the printed OCTAN slope bricks that are neat to have, a very rare and moderately useful forklift assembly brick, an exclusive "CARGO" printed helicopter tail brick that looks right at home on an MOC airplane, and much more. Parts selection is fantastic and honestly this set's worth getting just for that alone.

Playability: Very high owing to the huge amount of accessories included and the massive amount of elements. You can load cargo into trucks with the forklift, refuel the helicopter, have vehicles crash through the barrier gate, and tons more. Very playable. The right kind of kid will absolutely adore this thing.

Displayability? Pretty good too, honestly. It makes a great centerpiece for a Lego town (TLC never made enough private businesses in Lego form), gives your citizens of your Lego Land a place to work, and the set looks pretty attractive to the eye too.

Value For Money: Yeah this is the worst part about this. For how relatively few pieces this set came with the asking price of 50 dollars new was absurdly steep. Nowadays... it's actually gotten slightly more expensive, with ebay and bricklink prices easily doubling that if you want a box and instructions or just going a few dollars above that if you don't. As with so many neat old forgotten sets, you basically have to import it from overseas if you want to get it at all, and while the price has gone up the part count hasn't.

For the exclusive pieces it's worth if you're wanting to MOC something like this. If you're just casually wanting one... it's probably not worth it just because of how huge the price is. It would be an excellent 30 dollar set. It's not a great 50 dollar set and now that around 20 years have passed since it came out, it's not a great 60-70-100 dollar set either. If you can find it at a low price, it's a steal for exclusive parts alone. If you can't, it's not *that* necessary or interesting.

Recommended, but not for scalper prices.

This set is a nice addition to any LEGO city for sure. The build is very nice and easy and we also don't have to worry about stickers. I really love the design and that LEGO put so many vehicles in one set. The forklift has a feature which makes the black bracket moving up and down. The truck has a trunk where you can store some stuff. It's more like a pick-up truck. The ceiling can be removed very easily if you want to put in the minifig. There's also a small tanker and a big helicopter in this set. The helicopter is awsome. The two blades on the top sviwel full 360° and the windscreen can be moved up very easily, too. The helicopter also has a place where you can store some stuff in there.

This set also comes with a small warehouse which has 3 containers and a brown box in there. The other building has an office on the first level and on the second level. The gate moves up and down, too. The only problem is that there's a balcony but there's no door which the figures can use to get on the balcony. But it's still a cool set to have for sure.

All in all this set is an great set and I would HIGHLY recommend you to get this. You can find this set on eBay, BrickLink and Amazon for sure. Here is the link where you can check out the full gallery I made for this set on my website: http://www.klokriecher.de


Videos I made of this set:

Stopmotion 1
Stopmotion 2
Stopmotion 3
Stopmotion 4
Stopmotion 5
Review

Oh great Scott, it's another example of Lego Dumb-Town (which in the late 1990s replaced Lego Town). This set features the usual pre-fabricated walls, juniorised roof plates and lazy designs so common in the Dumb-Town range. There's also lack of real detail and over-simplified vehicles with no hinged doors. There's a rare fork-lift truck piece and a lot of useful little things such as a pre-printed computer, tools and the like. But even Basic "3" proved more demanding building than this. And what on earth is happening on the cover? The far-right corner of the building makes it look like it's either taking off or being pushed upwards by some underground movement.