Lego has a nasty habit of cranking out police station after police station and fire station after fire station. This made it very hard to build much of a Lego town after the nineties, the City Center line has very few non-fire/police/construction sets and the World City line had none. A city made up entirely of police stations is an odd city indeed. So I'll admit that I have quite the soft spot for buildings that buck that trend and give you something for your minifigures to do that isn't "get arrested" or "get the fire they've been set on put out" or "fix a road". Obviously there's good reason Lego does this: police stations sell, and fire stations sell, and construction sites sell, because every kid in the universe has seen a huge fire truck or a massive dump truck and gone "man, I wish I could do that". However, for both the older collector or the younger town builder it's nice to have a change of pace that isn't Lego Town Police Precinct #72000. This is one such set.

Okay, first thing's first: This set is the dictionary definition of juniorised. This bad boy has all the worst vices of Lego in the late 90's: entirely too few pieces, a huge amount of large wall bricks that should just be smaller bricks, prefabricated... basically everything, and far too sparse on details. With it granted that EVERY town set from the 97-99 era was like that, I can pretty definitely say that this is one of the better ones. It's not perfect, at all, but it's not bad and if you're a little kid when you got it as I was it's very fun and playable.

So how is it? Well as usual Lego curiously divided the instructions up into five parts, completely unnecessarily, so I'll review those five parts separately. The "too long, didn't read, sparticusjoe is too verbose" version of the review: It's got a lot of play features a kid will like, a mild amount of display features an adult would like, and a ton of absolutely baffling design decisions like every '97-'99 Town Jr. set.

The Main Building: This set is divided into two buildings each with their own baseplate. The main one on the left has one of those neat three angled window bricks, two absolutely huge "six 1x6 yellow bricks melted together" walls on each side, an two large prefabricated pieces for a roof, which is to say it takes all of four seconds to put together. Inside the building is a cash register and three motorcycle helmets on display, presumable for customers to pick up when they're buying a motorcycle. One of the interesting things about this set is that it's up to your youngster imagination to decide what the purpose of this building even is. Is it a dealership? A mechanic's shop? A place to rent motorcycles? It doesn't really explicitly say, so it's at least versatile. I really dig the sign on top, it's a printed piece and you get a whopping three of them with the set, which really helps for MOC purposes.

The Garage: Neat in theory, lacking in practice. There's a small indoor office area, a tool rack, a trash can with lid (nice touch), and a chain for suspending a motorcycle sort of like the one in Super Rescue Complex. This is a nice little area full of play features, have your mechanic work on the broken trike, hang out in his office, take the trash out, whatever, but the big problem is that keeping with late 90's bad building design tradition... the office is entirely empty. There's nothing in it. He has a blue brick serving as a desk and that's it. It really needs a computer screen or two and a chair, which you can add yourself, but it doesn't really help you if this is your only set you own.

Another thing about the two buildings included is that they have no way to connect the two buildings and baseplates. You can, however, swap out the two 1x6 black bricks for the 2x6 black brick to the right of them on the model to meld the two buildings together, which in my opinion makes it look a lot more visually pleasing when on display. Your results may vary, I'm sure nobody else cares about that.

There's also a little handcart thing included with this building that is a great detail. You can stash tools away in it and have your mechanic friend push it around. I dig little details like that.

The Truck and Trailer: Lego showing the constraint to not give this trailer a pointless sixth instructional sheet is astounding. Lego sure did like this trailer design, as it appeared in not one or two but three Town Jr. sets, basically unchanged minus the color (those being Police Chase, Turbo Champs, and this one). It works well to haul the included trikes around, so that's at least neat, but the odds are pretty good you already have an identical one if you collect sets of the era.

The truck is... well, it's a truck. The printed side plates look neat, and the trailer hitch is sturdy enough. You can fit tools in the back of it or the trash can or another person if you want, but it is, of course, a convertible. A convertible van. I have never in my entire life seen nor heard of a convertible van before, but if you collect nineties Town sets you'd think they were everywhere. No roofs to be found, almost ever, and this is another one of those "weird and implausible that it would look like this" vehicles that you wonder why they couldn't have just slapped one of those 4x4 sloped roof bricks on top of to make it resemble what it's supposed to. Not as odd as the convertible garbage truck or armored car, but still really odd.

Oh and it has a rollbar behind the driver. Every vehicle does.

The Car: Yes, this eight piece thing deserved its own instruction book, and let me tell you... you also probably already have this one. It's almost the same as the one that came with Octan Gas Station and Super Rescue Center. This one has a printed rear brake light brick on the back. That's it. Rollbar (obviously), no windshield (obviously), no roof (obviously), better resemblance to a go-kart than an actual automobile (also obviously)... It's the same lame late 90's car design you see a ton of times in this period of sets. I'm not really sure why it's included here. It doesn't really have anything to do with the set's theme, but there it is.

The Trikes: There are three of them included. All three are identical save for the color and that the blue one has an antennae for some reason. All three have rollbars which doesn't even make sense for a tricycle to have but there they are. Everyone wishes they were two-wheelers, but they're not, they're the same tricycles that Lego tried thrusting upon consumers so hard up until the mid 2000's. Not much to say here, really.

Building Experience: As with every single set of the time period, there really isn't much. The walls and roofs and baseplates are all prefabricated, the tricycles are all prefabricated, the chassis of the two motor vehicles are prefabricated... It is what it is, same as the rest.

Parts: Excellent score in this catagory! Tons of rare and exclusive parts. You get three "motorcycle mechanic" printed sign pieces, which can be really cool for making a MOC motorcycle dealer. You get a ton of trikes, for what that's worth, some really cool looking printed flame helmets, a bunch of those neat gray goblet shaped bricks, the SUPER rare Octan-branded flag and checkered race flags, a trash can, two baseplates (can never have too many!), a chain (can definately never have too many!), some plant bricks, and my favorite, an archway brick with a printed "trike repair" logo on it that's exclusive to this set. Tons of parts here so that even if you (justifiably) don't really dig the design of this building, you can easily re-build it with the included exclusive parts to make it better and more realistic.

Playability: Honestly quite high. There's a ton of features for your minifigures to do, there are a lot of moving parts and vehicles and things a kid would like. You get a lot of minifigs (4) to make different poses and have adventures with, and best of all, it's a business for your Lego town that isn't just a police station for the millionth time.

The displayability is pretty good too. Looks nice on a shelf with everyone posed. Also looks nice among other buildings in a town setting because it adds a nice bit of extra flavor to it.

Value For The Money: Surprisingly high as well. This set really hasn't gotten super duper expensive over the years, with copies popping up on fleabay for thirty-ish dollars and on bricklink for less than or equal to that. It isn't worth price-scalper-tier 70-100 dollars, and of course most of the exclusive parts can be bought on bricklink a-la-carte for cheaper, but fifteen to thirty bucks is an absolutely fair price for the surprisingly large amount you get here.

I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a building that would add some spice to their otherwise dour 1984-style police state Lego town. It's got flaws (all the sets from the era do), but for what it is it's pretty good.

This is my favourite garage LEGO ever did and it has lot's of play features as well. This set is very easy to build. We also don't get any stickery to worry about. This set comes with lot's of stuff like a truck with a trailer, a car, 3 motorcycles and 2 buildings. The trailer of the truck can be removed very easily. The first building has a garage where the engineers can repair the motorcycles. The other building has a shop where the figures can buy the motorcycles. In the inside of the shop you can find 3 helmets which the figures can buy as well. It's a great set to have and it's a good addition to any LEGO city as well.

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
Review

All those years ago when I recived this set, it was great at the time. Had loads of playability. Unfortunatly this set suffers from juniorization that continues to plauge Lego. Howeverm despite these setbacks and the basic cars, its a nice set and good addition to a town. If you can find it for cheap I recommend picking it up. Nice way to add to any town....

-Mike Lucio "SpartanML"

I bought this set many years ago because I feel it has so many cars and it's valuable. But when I replayed this set recently I found all tires become sticky, just like some oil on the surface of the tires. No matter how I clean them, it is still there. It is really annoyed.

I agree totally with the comments above. The building is a good representation. The problem is the vehicles from this era are generally poorly detailed to those produced now and even those produce mid 80's - 90's.