Friends

Heartlake City Resort

The biggest Friends set of 2018, and it earns every one of those thousand pieces.

Brick Rated Score

4.2/5

Set 41347 · 2018

Pieces1,019

Minifigs4

Year2018

Set number41347

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The verdict

This is the Friends set that stops being a toy and becomes a proper playset you don't want to take apart.

You get a whole hotel, a working monorail, and a beach water park with two slides and a splash bucket, all in one sprawling build. The monorail is a bit of a letdown if you were promised something grand, and those big triangle stickers will test your patience. If you love Heartlake City or you just want the most set for your money, this one delivers.

Best for: Friends fans who want one big centerpiece playset instead of five little ones

The full review

What it is

Some Friends sets are a quick afternoon and a shelf spot. This one is a whole holiday. Heartlake City Resort 41347 is a LEGO® set that hands you a hotel, a monorail, and a beach water park all at once, and at 1,019 pieces it was the biggest Friends set of its year. You build a resort with a lobby, a restaurant, a juice bar, a rooftop terrace with a DJ stand, and two proper bedrooms. Then the monorail track carries a car over to the water side, where there are two waterslides, a tipping splash bucket, a changing room, and a little beach with a water scooter, a parasail rig, and a lifeguard stand. The finished thing is over half a metre wide, so it takes up real table space and it looks like a place you'd actually want to visit.

The catch

Now for the honest bits, because there are a couple. The monorail got teased pretty hard before release, and a lot of people were picturing something substantial. What you actually get is a single-seat car, and if you built it up in your head as the star of the show, it lands a bit flat. The other niggle is stickers. There are some large triangular ones on the slides and signage, and getting them square and bubble-free is genuinely tricky, the kind of thing you want to do slowly with clean hands. And the price is worth naming. At $99.99 originally it was one of the pricier Friends sets going, so it was never an impulse pickup. It has retired since, and prices on the secondary market have climbed well past that, so if you're hunting one now you'll pay a premium for the size.

Who it's for

None of that changes the fact that this is one of the most satisfying Friends sets to actually play with. The reviewers who spent time with it kept landing on the same thing: it's big, it's varied, and the build never turns into the same wall over and over. Brick Insights has it sitting around 88, comfortably in the upper tier of sets. If you or the Friends fan in your life loves Heartlake City and wants one giant centrepiece instead of a shelf of small builds, grab it. If you mainly wanted a dramatic working monorail, temper that one expectation and you'll be delighted with everything else. It's a lot of set, and it feels like it.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

The build breaks into satisfying chunks, which is a big part of why it never drags. You start on the hotel with its lobby and restaurant, move up through the bedrooms and the DJ terrace, then switch gears entirely for the water park side with its slides, splash bucket, and beach. Because each section has a different job, the techniques keep changing, so you're not laying the same rows of plates for an hour. The monorail track is its own neat little sub-build with arrows in the instructions showing how the car is meant to run across. The only spot to slow down for is the big triangular stickers, which reward patience and punish rushing.

For parts, this is a lovely donor set. You get a generous spread of sand, tan, and bright plates and tiles that are perfect for beach, resort, or town MOCs, plus the palm and foliage elements and the translucent bits for the water features. The four mini-dolls are all exclusive to this set, and Stephanie's and Mason's leg pieces don't appear anywhere else, so collectors get something they can't grab elsewhere. Sheen the dolphin is the charming extra. At 1,019 pieces for the original $99.99, the per-piece value was fair rather than remarkable, but you're paying for the sheer scale and the play features as much as the brick count, and on that measure it holds up well.

Fun facts

01At 1,019 pieces, Heartlake City Resort was the largest LEGO Friends set released in 2018.
02Every mini-doll in the box (Stephanie, Andrea, Olivia and Mason) is exclusive to this set, and Stephanie's and Mason's leg pieces appear in no other set.
03The finished resort stretches over 51cm (20 inches) wide and stands more than 26cm tall, big enough to dominate a whole tabletop.
04The monorail that got fans excited turned out to be a single-seat car, which became the set's most talked-about mild disappointment.