LEGO Parts Pack Review: 60131 Crooks Island

60131 Crooks Island is a LEGO City set released in 2016.

This is the other set I picked up in an impulse haul along with 10677 Beach Trip. This set was on special, at a whopping 40% off. Now, I never found myself interested in the police subtheme of LEGO City, or most of its other subthemes for that matter, because I've always just wanted to build a peaceful neighborhood and I didn't think crimefighting fit into that theme.

So what made me pick up this set despite it being a police set, besides the significant discount? The parts. This has a great selection of specialized parts that I feel would be useful to not just my collection, but perhaps many others' as well. I already have some use cases in mind for some of the parts, and you just might spot them in some of my future MOC posts!

This set does come with stickers, but since I intend to almost completely part out this set, I will only be applying one of the stickers that's still moderately general-purpose. You'll find out what it is later in the review. The good news is that the models themselves don't rely on most of the stickers to look good and work well for play. So there will still be some pictures of the finished models; the focus though is on the parts.

The box

The front of the box depicts a small island hideout with an olive green shipping container on one side and some terrain on the other. I guess there's a tall rock formation that the crooks were able to build their hideout off of, which would explain the use of a mountain panel piece on what seems like an otherwise rather flat island. This mountain panel piece is further discussed along with the rest of the parts.

The back of the box shows a pretty amusing play scenario, ending with the crooks getting arrested because the greedy prison escapee chose to open his loot in broad daylight. You can also see two push tabs in lieu of tape seals.

You can tell that this is a set that either warmed shelves or exchanged many hands due to the significant shelf wear on the box. But as I'd bought this set primarily as a parts pack, that didn't bother me at all. I plan to recycle the box.

What's inside

The box contains 3 numbered bags of parts, a dark grey 6x16 plate, a dark grey corner mountain panel piece, a sticker sheet, and 3 instruction booklets corresponding to the 3 numbered bags. The instructions have you build, in order:

1. The olive green shipping container from which the getaway waterscooter is launched using a Technic mechanism.
2. The hideout itself to which the shipping container is attached.
3. The police helicopter scouting for the hideout.

As you've seen from the cover picture for this review, I did build the set once, without applying any but one of the stickers. I won't be reviewing the set itself in depth but I'll still quickly go through how the parts come together to make the whole.

New, noteworthy or rare parts

As you can see, unlike for my review of 60150 Pizza Van, I've chosen to arrange the elements by color first this time, while still grouping them by numbered bag and subgrouping them by shape. I don't know about you, but this looks more aesthetically pleasing, and it actually made building noticeably, even if not a whole lot, more efficient for me. I'm very much a color-oriented person (which, by the way, also makes learning color-neutral Rubik's cube solving quite the task for me), so it should come as no surprise that I'm able to find LEGO elements more quickly when they're sorted by color first.

New or rare parts

There is but a small handful of rare or at least very uncommon parts in this set:

1. 1x white 2x2 wanted poster, which has only appeared in one other set: the 2015 Modular Building, 10246 Detective's Office
2. 1x olive green 1x2x5 brick, which has also only appeared in one other set: 60108 Fire Response Unit, which also features an olive green shipping container
3. 2x olive green 1x2 grille, which has appeared in two other sets
4. 3x olive green 1x6x5 corrugated panel, which also appeared in 60108 Fire Response Unit, as well as the more recent 60169 Cargo Terminal from 2017
5. 1x dark grey corner mountain panel piece, first introduced in this set and 60130 Prison Island and appearing in six more sets (all LEGO City) since

Many older builders have a disdain for mountain panel pieces for taking away from the process of building brick by brick, but I personally don't mind them. My first encounter with them was in the Pirates set, 6254 Rocky Reef, in which I really liked sliding one of the mountain panel pieces to reveal the hidden skeleton. This wouldn't have been possible with a brick-built rock formation.

In fact, the empty space in the mountain panel piece in this set has a similar use! From the LEGO Shop's description of this set:

• Put the loot in the hideout's secret stash place to keep it hidden from the police.

Granted, given this is a corner it might have been possible with a brick-built rock formation, but I personally think it's nice that LEGO took the opportunity to introduce a corner mountain panel piece instead (it was new to this set and 60130 Prison Island). You may have noticed that a fair few of them appear in dark tan in this year's 71043 Hogwarts Castle!

Brickwork bricks/masonry bricks

Despite their irony (which I actually couldn't care less about), I'm a really big fan of LEGO brickwork bricks because their texture adds a lot of visual interest to otherwise plain walls. That's why every one of my reviews of sets containing them has a subsection dedicated to them.

In fact, they're one of the main reasons I bought 60131 Crooks Island as a parts pack. For its size, it contains a rather generous selection of 8x dark tan 1x2 brickwork bricks and 5x light grey 1x2 brickwork bricks. It's quite a bummer, then, that you don't really see a third of them in the actual hideout because so much other stuff is in the way.

The models

Waterscooter

This waterscooter is supposed to have 3 stickers: two on the tiles on the sides of the driver, and one on the black curved brick at the front. But even without the stickers, the waterscooter still looks pretty sleek!

On the front of the box, it says that the waterscooter does not float.

Police helicopter

This police helicopter takes up most of the stickers on the sticker sheet. Most of them are police labels and insignia, but without them the helicopter still looks the part, with police lights, a searchlight, and a police color scheme. The striping does stop somewhat abruptly at the white slopes flanking the pilot's seat without the stickers on the sides of said slopes, though.

Also, annoyingly, the pilot has to lean back slightly in order for the helicopter canopy to close fully.

Hideout

The hideout consists of a shipping container attached to a small minifig-made structure. The shipping container has a Technic mechanism that is used to launch the waterscooter to make a quick getaway.

Unfortunately, the reason only three of the olive green corrugated panels are included here is because the space for a fourth is instead used to create the attachment points to attach the container to the rest of the hideout. This is also where the lone olive green 1x2x5 brick gets used.

Next to the wanted poster here is a conspicuously plain dark grey 2x2 tile. That's supposed to be adorned with a sticker representing a furnace.

The one sticker I've used in this set is on the safe. Now the prison escapee can just brute-force the combination to get to the loot without having to use the cutting torch! But seriously, I do believe the safe will still serve very well as a general-purpose element, even and in fact especially with the sticker on to designate it as a safe.

Conclusion

60131 Crooks Island is not a LEGO set I normally would have owned, since I'm not normally into police-themed sets. However, thanks to the significant discount, I decided to grab it for the selection and quantity of useful parts for a multitude of purposes. I figured it was worth the sale price.

And hey, looks like I managed to use at least one of the stickers after all!