Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020)

The graphics are charming and genuinely pretty in places such as the sky/weather and the textures and designs of most of the villagers. It's easy to forget how good they are, but looking back at older games makes it clear that New Horizons is a massive graphical upgrade.

Characters are appropriately adorable-looking, but completely devoid of personality. Villagers are the entire point of this franchise, as well as the bonds you form with yours, and yet in this game they've been reduced to window-dressing for your customised island who recite the same dozen generic lines identical to every other villager of the same type. A lot of my 'dream villagers' are of the same few types, and so I can be hitting nothing but repeated dialogues within literal minutes of opening the game. It's soulless.

The gameplay is... fine. There are some good QoL improvements, such as the way clothes shopping now works at the Able Sisters and terraforming the land, but there are just... so many things that were a given in older games that have been cut out or have regressed in this one. The crafting system is awful and repetitive, DIY recipes are time-consuming to get and even then mostly just carbon copies of ones you already have, even golden tools (extremely difficult to construct) are now breakable, and shops have far fewer or no upgrades to uncover, just to name a few.

You can have up to eight players on an island over online multiplayer, or up to four using local co-op. It's pretty much what you'd expect from Animal Crossing - you can run around together and visit each other's villagers (so you can experience their generic dialogue, too!) but aside from activities you can come up with and design yourself there's nothing to really do together.

Overall, this game just... depresses me in a lot of ways. It's stripped back, sanitised, minimalised and "streamlined" in that corporate, modern game kind of way, where all the charm and heart is being lost in order to fit flashy new features to distract from all the ones that have been made worse. Sure, it was a nice refuge over lockdown, but it genuinely kind of angers me that that means this game is going down as a huge best-seller success when it's just... empty. It has the same kind of issue as Sims 4, to my mind, and the fact that so many players picked New Horizons up as their first Animal Crossing game means they don't even know what they're missing. I'll be returning to Wild World and perhaps even New Leaf, because playing this just reminds me I miss the old villagers.

Back when I upgraded to a Switch OLED, I stupidly forgot that Animal Crossing has a separate save transfer system from other Switch titles, leading me to lose my old save. Now that I've been spending this past month moving to a new place, I thought it was a good time to revisit New Horizons from scratch. I sure needed a slow-paced game I could play in short bursts.

New Horizons is simultaneously the ultimate Animal Crossing and a downgrade from the previous entries. The amount of content, especially after the post-launch updates, is crazy. The new tools that allow you to completely customize your island are a blast. It's a very visually polished title in a series that was once derided for its simplistic graphics.

But when I think back to what made previous Animal Crossing entries so charming, I think of atmosphere. Simplicity. An escape from the stress of modern life. New Horizons certainly still has a lot of that stuff, but it feels like it's slowly leaving the core tenets of the original game behind.

The main culprit is the crafting system. Did Animal Crossing, a franchise once based on living peacefully with nature, need new mechanics focused on resource extraction? While I understand the desire to add things to occupy the player's time, hitting rocks and picking weeds was never the most fun part of Animal Crossing. These mechanics take up a ridiculous amount of oxygen in New Horizons' early game, making it a bit aggravating on revisit.

New Horizons trickles out many of those basic Animal Crossing staples that past games did not make you wait for. It takes days for you to get access to a museum, shop and town hall. Once you build up your island a little bit, though, you start to settle into the typical Animal Crossing rhythm. With enough hoarded resources, you can focus more on fishing, bug hunting, snazzing up your house and interacting with your villagers.

Decorating my house and town were always my favorite parts of Animal Crossing, and New Horizons hits it out of the park there. I remember the days of Wild World where you had to use patterns as roads--Having outdoor customization options that let you add roads, fences and even modify cliffs and rivers is a total dream come true.

New Horizons' soundtrack is a significant downgrade. Perhaps it's a little unfair, because New Leaf had one of the best soundtracks Nintendo has ever put together on any of their games. However, these rather jazzy and energetic tracks feel completely at odds with the relaxing atmosphere that I typically expect from an Animal Crossing title. I know Manaka Takaoka must have been busy with her work on Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, but please bring her back for the next Animal Crossing! Her more ambient-leaning compositions are absolutely perfect for this franchise.

Once New Horizons gets out of its own way, it's a wonderful time. The new town customization mechanics bring out the best in the series, but the gathering and crafting systems feel like they compete with its core ethos. I don't expect these mechanics to go away in the future because of how successful New Horizons was, but I sure hope that they don't emphasize them more in future titles. While I very much enjoy this game, if I was stuck on an island with a single Animal Crossing game, this is probably not the one I would pick.

Although I received New Horizons for my birthday a few years ago, I consider this a shared game between me and my mom, who took to it like a fish to water. She's never been a big gamer, despite our household being quite into video games, so to see her put hundreds of hours into our special island paradise--paying off both her loan AND mine, getting us to five stars when I thought it was hopeless--has been extra special! You could call Animal Crossing a gateway drug, since she's now quite invested in Disney's Dreamlight Valley as well!

We're still playing together and recently decorated the island for Christmas (haven't yet cleaned up...oops). I hope we keep returning to Forthem for many years to come! <3

This game is all about creating your own unique safe space. With sheer endless possibilities for decoration (indoors & outdoors) and customization, no two islands will look the same.

I very much enjoyed the attention to detail, the seemingly infinite amount of available items to place, hang and wear does not come at the cost of the beautyfully crafted 3D-models for each one. The level of immersion you can reach really puts weight into the simulation aspect of the game.

This is further enhanced by the real time system, where time on your island passes the same as your own, meaning on the one hand you will reach a level of content saturation on a given day relatively quickly even in the beginning. But on the other, you have all the same reasons to come back, even if its just for a limited amount of time, because there are always things to do every time you play it.

This game can seem as a scary long time commitment, but unlocks its true longevity as a constant in your life, accompanying you as you grow fond of your island, your home and your villagers in small steps every day.

As the title says, this is my first romp in the Animal Crossing franchise. And to be frank, I did not have much fun with the experience. The game does not respect your time, I feel, with how supplies break, when you require them for the fundamental gameplay of the game.

I am aware of the franchise and its adoration by fans, but compared to glimpses of earlier entries, New Horizons seems to be lacking some sort of soul to it. Difficult to recommend this game to anyone

I'm trying hard not to vote this game down out of anger, but it is hard after seeing my turnips spoil. They spoiled because I am an adult with a lot of responsibilities; I can't always play during the day when the game clearly wants me to.

Why do I tell you this? \I bought a "small" amount of around 100k in turnips this previous weekend; I then, on top of working full time, had to move, and set up a graduate program for study, prepare my old apartment for departure, etc. All this, while in a relationship. I turned back the clock a few hours later at night, figuring I would use the time to do my usual run of pulling out a few fossils, grabbing a few fish, donating what I didn't already have to Blathers, and then selling the rest. And the turnips I had bought were now spoiled, because the game found my backpedaling cheating.

In a way, I get it. The game is dependent on matching the real world. But just as I remember wishing I could play earlier iterations of these games when the game clearly wanted me to, but couldn't due to weird work hours, I now find myself unable to because I am an adult man with responsibilities. So while I find this game charming and I think you should definitely try it (even if these games "aren't your thing," you might be pleasantly surprised!)... you should keep in mind that this game, without question, does not care about the particulars of your life, and you will never be able to "unlock" the entirety of the game without truly having to dedicate yourself to the game, at the detriment of the game.

OK, OK, I'm angry. And I'm being a little annoyed in my review. But at least heed my warning. There is a reason this game did insanely well during a pandemic is all I'm saying.

Considering that Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a game with new things to do each month, I wanted to wait an entire year before I went ahead and reviewed this one. Many people over the last year have said this was the perfect quarantine game, and that is sort of true. At the peak of the quarantine, I would wake up, spend an hour or two in my village, and especially in the first few weeks, did my best to create the ideal island for myself and my new animal friends.

I visited other islands, had friends I hadn’t talked to in years visit my island, ended up decorating by house almost exactly like my own, and generally had a great time doing so. At a time in my life that was fraught with loss, panic, and fear, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the perfect game to sit down with and just relax. Even at the worst times over the last year, this was an island getaway that I - and many around the world - desperately needed.

On Christmas Eve, I traded presents. When Halloween came, I gave out candy I had purchased throughout the month. On my birthday where I couldn’t see my friends, the animals on my island gave me a lovely surprise. Even on New Year’s Eve, I watched the fireworks go off as 2021 began. I didn’t feel like I had to do these things, but I wanted to see what the game would offer me at these times of the year.

Over the last few months, my returns to the island have become more sporadic. I maybe visit once a month or so, visits in which my animal friends guilt trip me for being gone for so long. Yet at the same time, I don’t feel too bad about leaving this island and not coming back for long stretches of time. Sure, I haven’t caught all the fish or bugs that this game has to offer, and there are still plenty of things for me to craft, but I feel like I’ve seen all that this game has to offer me. Once I perfected my island, my interest in the game largely depended on my personal goals.

I’ve played Animal Crossing: New Horizons more than any other game on the Nintendo Switch, and unlike so many players, I don’t mind that the game is recycling the same event, and not offering up more things for me to do. This game has already gave me hundreds of hours of enjoyment during a dark period in my life, and I don’t know that I could ask for much else.

Every once in a while, I’m sure I’ll come back and visit my old friends, pick some weeds, and listen to K.K. Slider on his weekly visits to my town. But for right now, I’m content with the experience I had on my island. Maybe I’ll go back for a vacation every once in a while.

The original Animal Crossing is one of my greatest childhood nostalgia gaming experiences. Barring a few inconveniences, I think they pretty much nailed the whole appeal of the game on the first time around. I struggled to get as attached to subsequent entries, but this one did grab me for a while.

Every technical and mechanical aspect of past games has been notably improved. Visually, it looks fantastic. Isabelle is still one of the best characters Nintendo has ever made, even if they withhold her in this game for a bit too long, and there are plenty of other charming characters as well. The game is easier to play all around. Unfortunately, it still gets in the player’s way far too often.

One nice focus Nintendo had in Breath of the Wild was keeping the collection of items and resources streamlined as it became a bigger part of the series. For most items, there is no “picking up” animation or announcement of what you gathered—it just shows a pop-up of what it is and now you have it. New Horizons relies far too much on its resource collecting (either actual resources, bugs, fish, etc.) to not have this kind of quick design.

This pain is felt not just in resource collection, but in crafting, shopping, donations, and other repetitive resident services. Crafting at first was a lot of fun, but soon felt like a chore, especially as I was forced to do more and more of it to access more features of the game. After a few weeks, I wish my tools weren’t breaking so much. I shouldn’t have to go through so much dialogue I’ve already seen just to donate to the museum. I shouldn’t have to manually redeem completed Nook Miles challenges. The game almost needs a “creative mode” like Minecraft has, but I really don’t think they need to go that far if they just streamline the core gameplay a bit.

The result of this is that by the time I got toward the end of the game’s weeks-long tutorial phase (for casual players), I was already fatigued of most of the game’s core loop.

There are many good things about this game, so I don’t want to be too hard on it, and I know some people will enjoy the things I’m complaining about. But this is basically why I am not quite as in love with this game as I wanted to be. I still recommend it to almost any Switch owner as a chill long-term title with many enjoyable aspects.

I didn't want to review this too early since updates will be changing the experience a lot over time. This is a marked improvement from earlier Animal Crossing titles in a lot of ways. There is more to do each day so there is more reason to sign in to play. The scope of what you can decorate and engage in make the game exciting to play. The updated graphics are a breath of fresh air.

On the other hand much of the game feels like a grind. Older games in the franchise had this too, but somehow the dialogue feels worse this time. It feels like it takes much longer to get through anything and this might just be because there are so many additional things to do that it is more obvious that the text is holding us back. In a lot of ways I feel like regular players are penalized because Nintendo is afraid of people processing too quickly by "cheating".

The game needs quality of life upgrades, the biggest of which being working with multiples inside of menus and the ability to step backwards without completely exiting a conversation. If this was any other user experience (like paying your taxes) people would not put up with this system. It's not cute or charming, it just feels outdated. Speaking of outdated, the online and multiplayer interactions are horribly limited. You might as well not play with another person on your own system.

Anyways, I hope that doesn't all sound too negative. I knew exactly what I was buying and it seems like it is holding up to that expectation.

This is a game built upon a great divide. On one hand, beautifying your island and progressing towards the image you form of it in your head is satisfying and engrossing while, on the other hand, a plethora of small nuisances compound to frustrate and inconvenience you on your otherwise mellow journey.

It’s the usual Animal Crossing fare, you spend a bit of time on it each day doing some weeding, digging up some fossils, shaking down some trees and finding furniture or running frantically away from bees. Occasionally a tarantula appears and knocks you the fuck out. All good stuff.

The control that you have over island development is great. You can reshape cliffs and rivers, you can move buildings around (with a fee, of course, the Nook will have his due), and you have all the usual tools at your disposal to plant bushes and flowers and create roads. You can create bridges and inclines to make your island more accessible in a variety of styles to suit the image you’re building for. This is all great stuff.

The devil is in the details. I’ve seen some people claim that this game has an 8-day tutorial. I would argue that it has a month-long tutorial! You need to reach a certain level of island quality before you have all the tools of the game at your disposal before you can really dig in and experience everything the game has on offer. Granted, this is assuming you don’t time travel, but I don’t care to get into the debate about that, I didn’t do it so my rambling here is informed on the amount of time I spent, maybe it’s not as grating when you skip around.

So, you’re living your best island life, working towards that arbitrary point at which you can landscape, and as you’re chore-ing away your tools break! That’s right, New Horizons has a crafting system now and you better bet it is implemented in the most ass backwards way possible. We’ve had crafting systems in games for a long, long time now and this feels like some of the earliest, clumsiest iterations from a decade ago. Every item must be crafted individually, you must watch an animation after each prompting to craft (you can speed this up, but it still happens), and if you want to craft a lot of an item (say you want 20 fishing bait) you will just mash away on you’re a button for a minute or two or three to get there. I don’t want to “current year” argument this but honestly, how does a game with a crafting system in 2020 not have an option to craft quantity?

On top of this, if you want to craft the more substantial tools you need to craft the poorer ones first, as they are materials for the better ones. This require multiple crafting prompts instead of merely having a resource check or something to craft straight to what you want.

Besides that, the crafting is fine. It’s nice to be able to make your own furniture and decorations instead of having to rely on the shop. The shops which close throughout the day, so you better be available to play when the game has mandated or else you’re out of luck. If you happen to work an afternoon shift, for example, and you get home around or after 9pm, you better boot right up or your shop will be closed before you get the chance. And, as far as I’ve gotten, there is no option like in New Leaf to make your town stay open late like the old Night Owl option.

In fact, the game is full of things like this. You can only buy turnips on Sundays, and even then, only until noon. While this is optional, it’s probably the best way to pay for your house or big construction projects and the design choice to lock people who don’t have the convenience of a Sunday morning without any other obligations is pretty anti-player.

And that’s what this really boils down to. Animal Crossing is a game that loves to waste your time. Not like, in a pleasant easy way, where you elect to burn a few hours hanging out on your island. It does that, it does that well in fact, but in the most meaningless and trivial way on top of that. You’ll find yourself mashing through the same old text boxes every time you go into a shop, or go to assess and donate fossils (which still can’t be done simultaneously), you’ll be crafting and recrafting tools during longer chore sessions, you’ll be inundated with text every time you want to play online and if you happen to play online you’re in for a “Nintendo experience” in the deepest, most feral meaning of the term.

Anyways, this is getting long in the tooth. Many people are enjoying this game, there is a lot to enjoy, but if you’re like me you will find some elements of the experience grating and trying. The overall charm of the game is still worth it all. Once you get into the island rhythm it can be enjoyable. The villagers all have great personality, it’s fun to get to know them and buy them presents. Once you can terraform your island it is gratifying to start redeveloping your island in the ways you had envisioned, even if it’s a clunky and inept system.

That said, if you can look past the flight turbulence of this game’s weaker spots you’ll find that the landing can be smoother than you thought, and that while you may be in some second rate resort it’s still worth it, just to be on vacation.

I have followed the Animal Crossing series since it first came stateside on the GameCube. With Wild World on the DS and then New Leaf on the 3DS, Nintendo seemed to take a "more is more" approach, adding in new specialized businesses and establishments (such as the Dream Suite and Happy Home Academy showcase) that let you dig deeper into the games' somewhat opaque back-end systems. In New Horizons, Nintendo has holistically reexamined the formula to expand the ways that players can interact with the world. It trades the business districts and specialty shops for a wilder, more pastoral setting and finally gives the player a lot more autonomy over the space. It has introduced crafting and procedurally-generated islands to visit, to incentivize players to mine for resources and collect the fossils, bugs and fish the series is known for. And my favorite addition is the Nook Miles system, a new currency that you obtain by performing and accumulating daily tasks, which helps keep things fresh. Nintendo has continued to service the game since launch with a ton of content and events. As of right now, they are preparing to launch an update which will expand the museum to include the art gallery. It's probably the first service game I look forward to seeing evolving over a year or two... The massive install base and social conversation should keep the developers involved for a long time to come.

Additionally, in the outfits and custom crafted items, the developers have created by far the cutest designs in the series. The amount of self-expression the game allows is reminiscent of Little Big Planet, dwarfing previous installments. Likewise, production values have really shot up for the score, which for the first time feels comprised of organic instruments and is liable to be one of the best video game soundtracks this year.

Its flaws are, typically for Nintendo, double edged. Local multiplayer has drop-in-drop-out flexibility, but it shafts anyone who starts after player one. Online multiplayer is a clunky process and is driven more by a player-run economy of supply and demand than it is by in-game goals. Crafting and text prompts feel dated and sluggish. But to me these contribute to the natural rhythm and old-school charm of the game. Efficiency isn't really the point, it's more about the engagement over a long period of time, and I look forward to returning.

Played (and still playing!) digital copy on Nintendo Switch.

In the midst of this weird situation the world is going through, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a great game to clear your mind from all the chaos.

No one can forget how we learned of this game. We hadn't had a traditional Animal Crossing for years. People really wanted one. And then, Isabelle is revealed to be a newcomer in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and everyone is going nuts. We then see Tom Nook. The screen fades and we see that Nintendo has been listening. Everyone loses their minds. And the wait begins.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a very beautiful game in terms of visuals, graphics, music, characters, and progression.

Every morning you turn your Switch on to see what's happened. The game does run in real-time.

There's plenty to do. Improve your house, Island, Interact with villagers, catch fish, bugs, improve the Museum and many more.

Online play is very fun as well.

Seeing your Island improve by the day is extremely satisfying.

Fantastic game during uncertain times

4/5