The Brothers Brick recently purchased several sets from the LEGO Friends line in order to give our readers a feel for the new line. My 11 year old daughter and I reviewed the following sets and I let my nieces (6 and 8 years old) play with the sets for an afternoon. Nannan has already done one review from a parts perspective and Caylin has done one from the perspective of an adult female fan. Hopefully this review, from a father and daughter view, will be just as useful.

3188 Heartlake Vet

This was my favorite set of the four that we built. It’s a well-designed set with lots of play value. The exterior is a rather simple build but the interior is packed with some pretty cool details, such as an X-ray machine, scale, and examination table. It includes a stall for the horse and lots of new accessories, which are only slightly over-sized when held by traditional minifigs. It also includes the new flowers, which I liked. The new animals are cool, but I was pretty disappointed in the horse. It has no moving parts and the new mini-dolls can’t sit on it or interact with it in any way, except to stand on its back. So unless you’re going to build a horse-vaulting arena with it, the horse is pretty useless. I liked the mini-dolls more than I expected but they’re nowhere near as versatile as regular minifigs. The biggest drawbacks are that the legs can’t move individually and the almost total lack of connectivity.

3061 City Park Café

This set has the most interesting exterior of the sets we reviewed. But the interior is really good as well. It has a display case w/register, booth for customers and small kitchen area. The forks and knives will be useful and the mixer has some interesting connection points that I’m sure will enable it to take a place among its greeblish brethern. My main complaint with the set was the new cupcake pieces. They’re designed to hold a 1×1 round plate/stud but there’s really no “connection” as the 1×1 just sits in it. A tighter connection would have made this piece much more versatile.

3065 Olivia’s Tree House

The tree house is a fun little set with some interesting animals. The tree design is really nothing new but it is sturdy and stands up under play very well. The set comes with the new flowers in red but also includes some of the old flowers. Having the two together in a set makes it immediately obvious that they two don’t go well together. They each have their place but together looks rather off.

3936 Emma’s Fashion Design Studio

This was the smallest set we got and I’m not sure that it is a good buy for what you get. There are unique printed pieces in the set (ipod, anyone?) but there were no interesting design features.

Josh’s Daughter:

To start with, I think that one of the biggest drawbacks is that the girls feet can’t separate and they can’t sit on studs. Also the horse in the Vet set can’t pose very well because the head does not move up or down.

Their hair is pretty neat because it can be switched with a different mini-doll or regular mini-fig. I also really like the three sets of silverware in the Cafe set. They are cool because the mini-dolls can hold it and it looks more real when they eat. Also in the Cafe set there are cupcakes that a single stud can sit in. I like those because it adds another food.

I like the pastel colors but I think there needs to be more dark colors in the sets. Also having only five mini-dolls could get boring because you can’t switch them around as much as you can with mini-figs. Having all the new animals and food is really nice. My dad had the cat chasing the bird. The new flowers, butterflies and Ladybugs add some more detail to the sets. Also, since every new animal I’ve seen has a hole in their heads, you can put bows and things on them all. The girls also have the holes so you can put bows and ribbons on their heads. The Vet set has a little hat for the veterinarian to wear. She also has an icepack that fits into the hole on the animals heads.

Out of all the sets that we built, the Vet is my favorite. All the new animals are cool and the hedgehog is my favorite.

My two nieces both enjoyed the sets, but the 8 year old liked them the best. She already likes LEGO and she loved the new mini-dolls. Her favorite set was the vet because of the animals. My six year old niece is normally bored with LEGO as she prefers Playmobil. But she played with them for a couple of hours and specifically commented on “the pretty colors”. After I had put the sets away, she came up to me and asked if she could get those “Playmobil Lego sets” out again.

If you have any questions about these sets, please feel free to ask them in the comments. Here is a link to my entire gallery of Friends pictures. I hope this review was helpful to you!

Hi there. I’m Caylin, and I am an AFFOL—a female adult fan of LEGO. And I might just have a new infatuation with the LEGO Friends line. It looks serious.

As a kid, I grew up with the typical “girl” toys like Barbie. Oh, I had plenty of Barbies—and my favorite was the ballerina. I had a Joey doll, too, from NKOTB. I played with Kenner’s original Littlest Pet Shop, I had My Little Ponies. And I had LEGO. Now, granted, I taught myself to tie a noose with my Barbies and my Littlest Pet Shop iguana went head to head against the Jurassic Park velociraptors. So my play habits might not have been fully in line with maybe the norm.

But oh, the Friends line. My inner child is laughing with sheer glee.

I built 3315 Olivia’s House. I really quite enjoyed the build. I’m impressed on a number of levels with the model itself. It’s not parts intensive, of course, like the Café Corner and comparable sets. But thankfully it’s NOT Belville. The walls are some of the larger pieces, but I think that’s okay. I wouldn’t be buying this line for the bricks, anyway.

The accessory builds are pretty nifty, too. I love the blender design, and the barbeque gets the point across without getting too overly bulky. The shower door is simply but effective.

What I liked most about this particular set is that it’s modular. Each room is a completely separate build. And they’re quite detailed, too. I do, however, want a word with whoever is the interior designer of this house because purple furniture is terrible, and the resale value has to be in the hole with that lime-green kitchen. But again, my inner child is squealing with glee over the fun colors. So I’m torn.

The adult me, however, is asking who sleeps where because there’s only one double-occupancy bed for a family of three. I can’t say I understand why you’d sunbath on the roof, but that I think is a question for the architect of the house.

This house is completely designed for interaction and customization, and certainly not with the silly levers and numerous catapults from some of the other lines. There’s nothing to pull to make a mini-figure drop, and nothing to fling. And it’s totally fine. I don’t miss any of that. I’d describe it best as a “build your own dollhouse” with the LEGO edge to it. It is definitely ALL LEGO, though. I think the best description I’ve seen is that the Friends line is most definitely a “gateway” line. Some of the other lines are definitely marketed towards boys, which is fine. But this line is for their sisters, which is ultimately bad news for the brothers, since now there’s competition for available brick during playtime.

Now, I get that this line has caused something of an uproar with certain groups. I’m going to tell you that I do not feel marginalized or stereotyped at all by this line. I am offended that the color choice for the bed is blue and yellow, which are not complementary colors and one is a warm color and the other is a cool color — NOT the fact that there’s pink and purple and lime green and whatever other color the set designers put in the sets. It’s a complete non-issue for me that the mini-dolls made more of an attempt at a general human design rather than a flat block. The vibrant colors are for accent, but the bulk of the build is white and tan. I’m 26 years old and I sat down and played with the set after I built it. And once I was done, I made alterations to it. Because it’s LEGO and that’s what you’re supposed to do.