Today LEGO has revealed a huge swath of new LEGO City sets for 2022, taking the wraps off 21 new sets. The sets span the usual City subjects with a heavy emphasis on emergency services with a new police station, fire station, and hospital, but also bring some less common subjects like a school, city park, and even a sardine factory. LEGO also revealed a pair of new City space sets that are a collaboration with NASA and are loosely based on NASA’s real-life Artemis project to return to the moon. While LEGO only revealed two of these NASA-inspired sets, we know there are more in the works since the back of the boxes point to there being additional sets in the space lineup. All of the new sets will be available Jan. 1, 2022.
Those all look pretty fun. So many squirrels! I wish they’d introduce a black-lab type dog one of these days.
The last round of city sets I thought were a bit overpriced, even when considering the new road plates, new magnetic grabbers, net launcher, etc. This wave seems a bit better but IMO each set should really contain 20-50 more parts to be a good value.
The new projectiles, especially the ice cream splats and the broken eggs, looks like a lot of fun to play with my kiddo.
The prices on so many of these are just laughable. I nearly fell out my chair when I saw the hospital, an $80 set, was $120?!
Putting the price aside these are a bit weird…there are strange neon colors and some have a weird “Jack Stone” feel in places. You see some great stuff and then its undercut by terrible choices.
I miss the days when crooks had crowbars and tnt. Now they use ice cream and eggs…
Most of these look like trash.
Jeez, what a bunch of terrible sets. Lego is really POOPing it up this year. And that schoolbus is hideous.
I’m a bit concerned that the astronauts in the SLS set are riding in the upper stage fuel tank and not in a capsule. Definitely feels like that rocket needed to be a lot bigger if they wanted it to launch a minifigure although that would probably increase the price by more than they wanted a City set to cost. The moon base looks pretty cool though.
The police and fire stations look kind of sad though. I’m not sure if this is just nostalgia talking but I remember those sets being way bigger before when they were the $100 peak of the City line. Now we just have these tiny things.
Woah! What horrible 2022 wave!
New school is very tiny (is impossible made something like Hidden Side High School?), and police and firefighters’ new stations are simply ridiculous! They’re offensive!
in the past 10 years, all police stations have gotten worse! please compare:
7498 (2011), 60047 (2014), 60141 (2017) and, of course, the new 60136 (2022) …
and 6386 Police Command Base (my first police station, from ’86) had half the parts of the new one and looks twice as big! What happened, Lego?
60327 Horse Transporter looks like just a reskinned copy of https://brickset.com/sets/7635-1/4WD-with-Horse-Trailer?
That moon base would make a great start to a new classic style Space theme. It would be nice if they could get away from so many Earth launch bases and uncouple it from City. I’m sure it has to do something with SKU assortments and retailers wanting more Star Wars and Harry Potter; but as a Classic Space fan I’d love to see it properly come back to store shelves.
Mostly terrible unrealistic sets. When will LEGO realise it is not for children! I only like the Race Car, School Bus in the School Day set and the Mobile Crane which reminds me of the one that made me late for work every time I got stuck behind it.
Horrible prices. I wasn’t aware there was now a Lego City Adventures tax too, as if a road plate tax wasn’t bad enough.
High-priority thoughts: Give me an 8-stud-wide ambulance! Give me an 8-wide firetruck! And an 8-wide school bus, for pete’s sake! Those vehicles would be SO MUCH BETTER, and they’re big in real life as well – it’s senseless to keep them 6-wide. I appreciate the 8-wide mobile crane, at least; that’s very good.
Dumb musings: I see the overfunded police force is still targeting all service industry and blue collar workers who happen to like grey and white horizontal stripes in their wardrobes. Very sad. Also, how many ice-cream trucks are we up to in LEGO Town, anyway?! But I really do like the functionality of splat-shooting in this novelty ice cream cone, and the ice cream costumes. And I do NOT like the police throwing a bucket of caltrops instead of a rolled-up set of track pieces as a spike strip.
Design philosophizing: The design of some of these sets is very strange. For instance, the school has an access ramp for wheelchairs (A cool idea!)… for which they had to raise the entire school. It would otherwise have been at ground level, and naturally easy to access via wheelchair. Also, why is there a schoolbus stop LITERALLY across the street from the school? These design choices, while bad in and of themselves, also reduced the parts available to make the school BIGGER. And it’s a teeeny tiny school. Oh yeah, and the climbing wall (A cool idea!) has zero handholds for minifigs. I’ll refrain from spelling out for you why that’s bad design. Oh, and the top classrooms can hold like two kids at a time, and are definitely NOT wheelchair-accessible.
The Fire Brigade set (More like a sardine factory set) is pretty neat from a functional play aspect, and I especially like the full-size shipping container (The only “actually very good” thing about the set). But what is the point or even the theory behind a secret sauce tower that shoots goo out, complete with its own minifig in hazmat gear to clean it up?! That meshes with absolutely nothing that’s going on in the set. This should just be a firefighter training building (Since it’s already built like a hollowed-out training facility, and not a real factory).
Beach Lifeguard Station has a road plate between the lifeguard and the beach? That’s really weird. And what poor devil is wearing a full-body mascot costume at the beach? And… wait, that’s a clutch of sea turtle eggs?! That part’s pretty neat.
Hospital is actually a really nice set, especially compared to every other Town set here. Good lines, really nice-looking ambulance, great play area for children, a bathroom, a janitor; I’m mostly over the moon about this one. But the helicopter is trash; they should just have made the hospital larger instead, left the helipad on the roof, and had a SEPARATE medical helicopter set. Maybe, I dunno, there even could’ve been an elevator. They went to all the trouble of accessibility for the ground floor of the school set, and yet in the hospital none of these injured people can even access the other floors (Let alone the roof).
Launch Rocket Center is pretty nice-looking, and the Exxon tank in the rocket booster makes me smile. Oh, and the little buggy is an HONORARY 8-wide vehicle, because it can hold two people side-by-side in the front (By virtue of having no sides to those seats)! I’ll take it.
Picnic in the Park is the only real winner of this bunch. It has two of those great new squirrels, and rock-solid design principles. A picnic table, a pizza, a little gardening maintenance vehicle; I can’t improve on it and it’s also not absurdly expensive for what it is. Clear winner.