Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Genre: Management Sim

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local), 2-8 (Local Wireless, Online), Online Content Sharing

The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

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Review:

Animal Crossing is technically a Management Sim, although it approaches the genre from a very laid-back, family-friendly, casual angle. For those unfamiliar with the series it places you in the role of a new resident of a growing town, performing small tasks at your own pace and gradually growing and customizing your home, as well as the town as a whole. This time around, the town in question is on an island, and that’s actually one of the more minor additions this game makes to the series.

I’ll be honest, Animal Crossing is a damn difficult game to review, in part because it is designed to be a “slow burn”. Like previous games in the series, New Horizons uses a real-time clock, meaning that the time in the game is the same as in real life – if it’s 8:45AM in real life, it’s 8:45 in the game. If it’s March 23rd in real life, that’s the day it is in-game, and if you’re celebrating a holiday in real life, odds are good that the anthropomorphic animal residents of your Animal Crossing village are doing so as well.

This “virtual life” element is one of the key features of this series, and also a part of why it’s hard to review – you can’t just marathon an Animal Crossing game, as it is designed for new options and features to open up gradually, over time. Order something by mail in the game, and it will take a day in real-time for your resident to receive it. Start construction on a new building, and it won’t finish the same day. Yet Animal Crossing doesn’t make you feel like you’re waiting while nothing is happening – rather, it is clearly a game designed to be played a little at a time, with you checking in on your digital village every now and then to see what new visitors or events are going on today.

At least… that’s how the series has been in the entire time I’ve played it. However, New Horizons is really strongly making me assess that “slow burn” thing, because from the minute I started, I felt an absolute abundance of things to do. And where in previous games, a full game session could last ten or fifteen minutes, New Horizons managed to keep sucking me in for hours upon hours at a time.

A part of this is thanks to two genius additions to the series: crafting and Nook Miles. While anyone who’s played a game like Minecraft or Stardew Valley knows how addictive a good crafting mechanic can be, what really surprised me was how great the Nook Miles program was in compelling players to keep playing. This is an in-game “phone app” that tracks your activity and rewards you with points whenever you accomplish specific tasks. Now, instead of just wandering around aimlessly looking for something to do, players have some direction, should they decide they need it – work on one of the multiple Nook Miles goals and earn some points that can be cashed in for various prizes or a ticket to a randomly-generated resource-rich deserted island for you to plunder. What’s more, while your residents and shops all follow their own schedule, this core element of the game is available to players 24/7, meaning that you’ll never be stuck in the game with nothing to do.

There are improvements in just about every area of the game. When it comes to traversal, players now gain the ability to craft items like a vaulting pole and ladder to help them go wherever they please. In customization, players get tons of options for stuff to craft to deck out not just their house, but anywhere on the island. In fact, things previously decided at random in the series, such as the placement of shops and resident houses, are now all made by the player. And while I have not yet gotten to the game’s much-lauded new terraforming features, if it’s anything like the rest of the improvements, it’s bound to make for hours upon hours of fun simply customizing the world of your little island.

The game also has numerous smaller quality of life enhancements, like multiple new quick access shortcuts for tools, although there are still some areas where it feels a bit behind the times, such as the inability to make a persistent island for friends to travel to when you’re not there, the inability for players on the same console to create their own island rather than sharing one, the inability to craft more than one item at a time… there’s definitely still room for improvement in this series, even though New Horizons marks a huge step forward in most areas.

Oh, and I haven’t mentioned the presentation – Animal Crossing: New Horizons is somehow paradoxically both very quaint and simple in its visuals, but at the same time stunning and beautiful. Character designs are, from a distance, absurdly simple, as is the series style. But this time around, there are small details everywhere to draw you in. The furry animals seem to have a texture, as if made out of felt. The world’s simplicity is surprisingly well-detailed, and even includes nice little touches like raindrops causing ripples in the water, real-life shadows, and all sorts of other little details that might be easy to gloss over at first, but really give the game a great feeling of being this actual living, breathing place.

The game’s sounds and music are similarly a mix of extremely simple and very impressive – as always, character voices are a sort of “simlish”, where they’re speaking nonsense sounds based on the letters that form the words they’re speaking, so if you shut your eyes, you can almost make out what they’re saying. It’s a great stylistic choice that fits in well with the game, and goes along great with the cartoony sound effects.

This is paired with a great, mellow soundtrack that really helps to push the relaxed feeling of the game, with a nice introduction melody playing through your early hours of the game that slowly builds on itself as you get a better feel for the game, and when this introduction period ends, the game makes sure you have a variety of music with a theme for each of the twenty-four hours of the day, plus music for holidays and events, plus songs by the series’ musician K.K. Slider to collect or hear “played live”. The songs are all fairly simple and in many cases low-fidelity, and some of them are a bit annoying, but many of them are quite catchy, calming, or both. Overall, it’s an excellent accompaniment to the wonderfully relaxed experience of the gameplay.

On the topic of problems, the biggest complaint I have is probably the multiplayer, which is awkward to set up, and doesn’t really allow you to do too much once you get it going – players visiting friends online cannot interact with the environment in any meaningful way, which on the one hand I understand (don’t want that jerk friend of yours wrecking your town!), but on the other hand it feels like a missed opportunity.

Make no mistake – this is not a perfect game, and it’s not a game for everyone. If you need a game full of action, this clearly is not that. If you want something with some truly great multiplayer features… you may be disappointed. However, if you want a truly relaxing time in a world that acts as a digital counterpart to yours, and has a surprising amount of stuff to do, this game is a bundle of pure joy that goes above and beyond every other game in its series. Unless you’re allergic to slower-paced games, this game should be considered a must-have in your game library.

tl;dr – Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a light-hearted, family-friendly, casual Management Sim where the time and date in the game is the same as in real life, and where players perform small tasks and customize their home and their village. This entry is a huge step forward for the series, adding many new mechanics and gameplay systems that greatly improve the game’s customization elements while giving added quality of life enhancements as well. There constantly seems like something new and fun to do, with new surprises seemingly every day. Unless you have a problem with more relaxed, slower-paced games, you should consider this game a must-have.

Grade: A+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2020 Game Awards:

Winner:

Game of the Year – I think most people can agree that 2020 was an all-around terrible year, not just in the videogame industry, but in general. So it was some incredible luck that Animal Crossing came out at the ideal time to be the perfect balm to help people get through the difficult and depressing times we’ve been facing. Animal Crossing’s warm, welcoming, low-pressure style of play made for a spot of sunshine in an otherwise dour year, and it was helped by the fact that this entry in the series brought a whole host of improvements that helped the series finally realize its potential as a way to enable gamers to truly make their little village their own, giving us incredible freedom at a time many of us were trapped within our own homes.

It’s not a perfect game, of course – the multiplayer gameplay leaves a lot to be desired, and players looking to play the game on multiple Nintendo Switch systems or save the game on the cloud were undoubtedly frustrated by Nintendo’s backwards approach to these features. But these are small complaints about a game that was such a force for positivity in bad times that it became a cultural phenomenon celebrated around the world. Full disclosure – I have not touched my copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons in months. I have no doubt that my town is now covered in weeds and my villagers are sure to be vexed by my disappearance. But for a long while there, I was playing this game every single day for hours at a time, and absolutely loving it. If there’s any game that truly represents the best of what gaming had to offer on the Nintendo Switch in 2020, this is it. As such, it was my clear choice for the winner of eShopperReviews’ 2020 Game of the Year award.

Best Simulation Game – This was really no contest. While both of the other contenders in this category absolutely deserve recognition, the easygoing town/island simulation of Animal Crossing was immensely delightful, and the new additions to the series that allowed crafting and full island customization make this the first time the series has truly made you feel like you have complete control over everything that goes on in your little village. As a result, this was my clear choice for the winner of this category in 2020.

Best Game for Kids and Casual Players – This was a closer race than you might expect. While I consider Animal Crossing to be absolutely one of the greatest games overall in 2020, Island Saver is one of the easiest games for me to recommend for young kids thanks to its free price tag and educational content. Still, in the end, I had to give it to Animal Crossing – this wonderful game about managing your own little private island lets you go at your own pace, doesn’t make you sweat your mistakes, and gives kids (or the kid inside us adults) the perfect opportunity to express ourselves in a stress-free environment. That’s something I think all of us, young and old alike, can appreciate.

Runner-Up: Best Music, Best Sound Design, Best Graphical Style, Best Graphics

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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

Genre: Management Sim

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local), 2-12 (Local Wireless, Online), Online Content Sharing

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Review:

As Nintendo makes its way through its Nintendo Switch library, upgrading classic games on Nintendo Switch 2, it’s become a guessing game of how extensive these updates are, how much they cost, and whether the product of those two things is a good value.

Confusing matters further, the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched day-and-date with a massive 3.0 update that applies both to the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 versions of the game. Without going into detail, I can say that this is an incredible new update that has tons of content and great quality-of-life improvements… and none of that will be mentioned here because it’s not a part of this specific paid upgrade – all of the 3.0 update content is completely free. The Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, on the other hand, will cost $5 for those who own the original version of the game, making it the cheapest Nintendo Switch 2 upgrade for a Nintendo-published game that isn’t outright free.

So, what do you get for those $5?

The most obvious bump here will be to graphics and performance, with the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition bumping the graphics up from the Nintendo Switch’s 1080p docked and 720p handheld resolution to the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition’s 4K resolution in docked mode, and 1080p on handheld. This is an excellent change, and takes the game’s already-excellent visuals and makes them look even better. Unfortunately, there’s no upgrade to the framerate, which sadly remains stuck at 30FPS. This doesn’t affect the gameplay, but it’s a shame this wasn’t bumped up as well.

However, perhaps even more impressive than this is the dramatic change in loading times. On the original Nintendo Switch, it took me a minute and four seconds to load up the game to title screen, 36 more seconds to get to actual gameplay, and an additional 9-10 seconds every time you walk into a doorway. On Nintendo Switch 2, those times are massively slashed to 18 seconds, 17 seconds, and 5 seconds. I feel the need to highlight this – the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game takes roughly one-third the time loading into the game compared to the Nintendo Switch version. Honestly, that on its own is enough to make this upgrade worth it for me.

In addition to the performance and graphics boosts, there are a few other additional features. You can now host up to 12 people visiting your island instead of 8, provided that all of your guests are playing the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game. You still have to wait through the absurd “visitor landing” loading screen for each and every one though (and this one is not noticeably shorter), which really makes me question whether this addition is worthwhile.

When you do have folks visiting, they can opt to use CameraPlay with a Nintendo Switch 2 camera to display players’ faces over their character, if that’s the sort of thing that interests you. And at some point during the game you’ll get access to a new megaphone tool that can let players shout out a name to the Nintendo Switch 2’s microphone to locate a specific character more easily.

In the realm of slightly less niche, the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game allows for adaptive mouse mode… but only in very specific scenarios – when you’re arranging furniture inside a building, or when you’re designing custom art using the designer tool. The mouse mode works quite well in these situations, but the inability to use mouse mode for placement outdoors or just play using one Joy-Con 2 controller as a mouse at all times really limits the utility of this upgrade.

All of this is to say that most of the new features added to Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, while nice and certainly welcome, are all relatively niche and not likely to see much use with most players. Additionally, the lack of a framerate boost to match the improved resolution is disappointing. However, despite these missed opportunities to do a more extensive upgrade, I would still argue that the boost to resolution and especially the improved loading times make this $5 upgrade absolutely worth it, at least if you haven’t already exhausted your time with the game and have no interest returning to enjoy the new 3.0 update.

tl;dr – Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a light-hearted, family-friendly, casual Management Sim where the time and date in the game is the same as in real life, and where players perform small tasks and customize their home and their village. This entry is a huge step forward for the series, adding many new mechanics and gameplay systems that greatly improve the game’s customization elements while giving added quality of life enhancements as well. There constantly seems like something new and fun to do, with new surprises seemingly every day, and the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition adds improved resolution and greatly-improved loading times along with a few other more minor updates. Unless you have a problem with more relaxed, slower-paced games, you should consider this game a must-have.

Grade: A+

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