If there’s one thing the residents of LEGO® City enjoy more than excessive crime and a suspicious number of fires, it’s frozen sweet treats. Joining the likes of ice cream trucks and slushy vans is the Ice-Cream Shop. This is another of the new LEGO City sets being released this Summer and helps to expand the range of interesting non-vehicular offerings from the long-running theme. So sticking with LEGO City here’s another new set review with a closer look at the Ice Cream Shop. There are still plenty more reviews of upcoming sets on the way.
Product Details
Set Name: Ice-Cream Shop | Set Number: 60363 | Pieces: 296 | Theme: LEGO City
RRP: £29.99/$39.99/34.99€ | Number of Bags: Bags x 3 | Instructions: Paper booklet + Builder App | Stickers: Sheet x 1 | Minifigures: Ice-Cream Store Vendor & 2 customers
Availability: LEGO Stores, LEGO Online & General Retail from June 1st (August 1st in NA)
Most methods of deploying frozen sweet goodies in LEGO City have mostly been via mobile means, so from vans, bikes or carts. But this latest set to offer Ice Cream is a building, giving LEGO City one of its first-ever ice cream parlours. The set features a small building along with a few other buildable elements such as signs, a seating area and some minifigure folk to enjoy the tasty goods on offer. These various sections have their own instruction booklets, meaning they can be built in stages, should younger builders have short attention spans or be built by multiple people at the same time.
Before starting on the building of the building, there are a few smaller parts to construct. These include a small seating area, which actually comes into play right at the end of the build, along with a couple of signs and a bicycle with a box on the front. You may assume this is an ice cream-selling bike, but it’s actually for the customers to use with room in the small front-mounted section for the young boy minifigure to sit in. It wouldn’t have made much sense for an Ice-Cream Shop to also have mobile means of selling their ware.
LEGO City recently started using new base small plates which are used to create roads, patches of land or in the case of this set, the foundation of a building. The one featured in this set is an L-shaped plate. This gives the building both a large shop front and good access to the interior. Although the bottom section of the building is fairly plain on the outside, I really like the large-glass fronted panels, especially the rounded section of the frame. These give it the feel of a diner. Inside is a counter, which looks as you’d expect the inside of an Ice-Cream Shop to look. A car window screen makes the perfect cover for the ice cream freezer.
The LEGO City sets still have a way to go to outdo the impressive signage found in some of the recent Friends sets, but the one found on the Ice-Cream Shop is rather good. It’s a large ice cream cone, topped with a trio of different coloured scoops of ice cream. These are then dripping onto the building and form part of the frame around the shop’s door. It’s a clever way to incorporate ice cream into the set, especially as it’s integrated into the design of the shop. It’s simply a fun little building and goes to show that the LEGO City sets can expand beyond just offering vehicles or endless emergency services-themed sets.
The set includes a trio of minifigures – a young boy, a trendy-looking chap and the best of the bunch, an employee of the Ice-Cream Shop. The two civilians offer the usual generic characters, they both have fun faces and torso. The young boy’s sleeveless torso and checkered shirt do give off a street tough vibe but his smiley expression waylays any concerns of being jumped by him in a dark alley. His older companion has an 80s vibe to his overall outfit with a simple torso design and trendy shades. But the star of the set is the Ice-Cream Shop employee who sports a polar bear-inspired hood. Like other animal costumes, its design closely resembles that of the relevant animal figure, which is always a nice touch. Her simple outfit not only pairs well with the bear hood element but also with the building’s colour scheme.
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These sets were provided to BricksFanz.com by the LEGO Group for purposes of review. The thoughts within this review are that of BricksFanz.com and do not reflect those of the LEGO Group. Providing the set for free does not guarantee a favourable opinion of the set.