I've got my first Lego advent calendar back in 2009: 7687 was such a great experience for a City collector like me that it started a streak of getting every single City calendar in the following years. Or at least almost all of them: my streak has been lost in 2020, because 60268 from last year wasn't very convincing with the Lego City Adventures characters and so many similar microbuilds, so after 11 years of City calendars I passed on that one. It was kind of a letdown to see that this year's City calendar is quite similarly themed, but then I saw it on a huge sale once, so I thought I should give it a shot, thinking that maybe it could be fun too. What could go wrong with a half-priced Lego City calendar?

The box

We get a box that is very similar to other recent calendars - sadly this means we have this foamy plastic inside holding the 24 presents, which makes the box less conveniently usable as a part storage in the future. But the most disappointing thing is that the box art contains a tremendous amount of spoilers about the content all around the packaging, so even if you only take a look at the front and back of the box in the store, only 3(!) gifts remain a surprise out of 24. Unfortunately the City calendar boxes usually contain huge spoilers, but spoiling as much as 21 gifts is definitely a new negative record :(

Minifigures

Six minifigs are included if we don't count the Duke DeTain-mannequin-droid-snowman. Three of these minifigs are quite common in City calendars: the policeman-crook-firefighter trio doesn't provide much novelty, though their faces and headgear are nice and could prove useful in MOCs as well.

The other three figures seem much more interesting: Santa is a recurring star of these calendars, and we get the same very detailed design, although his head is unique this time suggesting that it is Fendrich disguised as Santa, but I stick to my interpretation that this is just Santa under the codename Fendrich :P The maintenance lady makes her second appearance in a set (60292 Town Centre being the first), and I like her head and hair design, but especially her torso: this is the only time a refuse operative wears a neon green visibility vest in Lego City, despite that in reality this outfit is very common for such workers. For me, Top Hat Tom stands out from the whole selection, with his unique torso and head he could make an excellent civilian character for a wintery City layout.

To conclude all this, I think the minifig selection is fair enough, although one or two more would have been welcome.

Builds

So we arrived to the most controversial aspect of this calendar: the builds. Part of them are minifig-scaled ones with a festive theme, and I quite like these. Yes, there is definitely room for improvement: the snowman looks a bit weird and wears a wig for some reason, the Christmas tree is way too small, and I'm not sure what that North Pole-sign-like build is supposed to be. But I like the two surprise gift tables and the small train very much, and I think all seven minifig-scaled builds are nice presents for an advent calendar.

Well, for the microbuilds... eh... there are a total of 11 microscale thingies in this calendar. Good news: it is 5 less compared to the previous year. Bad news: I think it is still twice as much as it should be. Look, I have no problem with microscale as a genre, moreover, I quite liked most of them in earlier calendars, but there are notable differences: in 2019 and before a very diverse selection of vehicles were depicted in microscale, and it was somewhat clear that they were supposed to be toys for the kid figures inculded. But this year we have 4 buildings and 7 vehicles, 5 of which are pretty identical, and I'm still not sure whether they are supposed to be toys or parts of a microscaled City-universe or what. One thing is sure: most of them are references for other existing Lego City products, which makes them kind of a cross-promotion inside Lego City. Unfortunately, things can get pretty monotonous when one wants to fill almost half of the calendar with very similarly structured builds. For the designs, I think the ambulance is quite nice, the helicopter and container truck are OK, but i'd pass on the other ones as they don't really have any outstanding design features for me. Moreover, the monster truck looks downright awkward with that wide wheels, and the lime lorry would seem like some modern train to someone who isn't familiar with the related City Stuntz set 60294.

Personally I think that this amount of mini-builds in a City calendar is just too much, I would have gone with keeping only the three aforementioned microbuilds and maybe the police car, and fill the rest with some little builds similar in theme to the other minifig-sized ones.

The completed set

The completed setup looks quite impressive altogether. In fact, with 349 pieces this is the City calendar containing the most parts to date, including lots of very interesting and rare ones, like the rubber duck, the candle, the lime scarf, the new bricks with horizontal profile and so on. These will be very useful for future building, but it's a bit sad that I can only think of this set as a parts pack as most of the builds could have been improved. Frankly there is no coherent theme, and only some builds are loosely connected to each other. I'm not saying that every calendar should follow the '1 minifig, 2 accessories' rule as the previous calendars had (though that wasn't a bad concept), but it just feels like some random stuff thrown together, no matter the scale or the context. For example, there should have been at least one hockey goal for the cop and the robber since they come with hockey sticks, or maybe a remote control to the micro vehicles if they were meant to be toys - such little additions would have helped to create a connection a lot.

The Star Wars advent calendars use a similar formula for ten years now, but throwing in some minifigs and microbuilds just works way better there, because in the movies there are memorable characters and vehicles that can be faithfully recreated in such small scale - moreover, the most likely people to get an advent calendar dubbed as Star Wars-y are those who know the movies. But City seems different because it is the only remaining 'unisex' non-licensed advent calendar this year, and as such I think everyone should be able to relate to it, so including characters and easter eggs (like the wig on the snowman or a loudhailer for Santa Fendrich) from a much lesser known TV show could cause confusion for the recipient who goes through on this calendar simply labelled as 'City'.

Verdict

Previous advent calendars all had their ups and downs, and some of them were better than the others, but in the end all of them was pretty much fun to build. This set is no exception, the fun of opening an advent calendar remains, but looking at this completed set something is noticeably off with this one, because this microscale scheme doesn't work perfectly for me, though it's hard to clarify why. I think it includes every small mentioned issue: the quantity and repetitiveness of microscale builds, the lack of a consistent theme and connection between the gifts, the scarce number of festive builds and the horrendous amount of spoilers all could have contributed to this. The pricing seems just a bit off if we consider the US RRP, the price-per-part ratio is not bad at all, but I'm glad I could get this on a clearance :D I can't completely dislike this calendar though because it had some very nice moments with the parts usage, the few festive builds and interesting minifig pieces, but looking at the whole set the previous calendars worked way better for me. But I'm not the target demographic anyway, and in the end the kids have to decide whether this is a good concept or not, so this is just my opinion, and time and market research will tell whether this formula works or not :D