Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!
Animal Crossing, at its core, is a game built around a repetitive loop. Collect, build, sell, profit, repeat. As you arrive on an island inhabited by a trio of Tanooki, you’ll be introduced to Tom Nook, gaming’s most well-known landlord. Tom Nook has plans for this Island, big plans, and you will play a huge roll in making those dreams come true. You’ll build up the land, your home, invite more colorful characters to live there as well, and eventually mold the island to your liking; pathing and terraforming the very rocks and waters that make up your new home.
By using a real-time calendar system, based upon a new choice of either the northern or southern hemisphere, you’ll take on your day to day routine in real-time, participating in real-world holidays, seasons, and events that see new characters, new recipes, celebrations and other factors that fundamentally change your island in significant ways. While you can time-travel to speed up the process, you do run into some consequences that may make you turn away from doing that. That said, you’ll wake up every morning, check your mail, harvest stone, clay, or iron nuggets from your rocks, shake trees to possibly find hidden furniture, collect various wood types, or unfortunately discover an army of deadly wasps gunning for your eyes. You’ll also have a native fruit to collect and hopefully discover foreign fruit on your friend’s islands that you can plant and sell on your island to turn a profit. There is a lot to keep you busy should you not tire of the same ol’ routine day in and day out.
When you first start up New Horizons, it will take at least a full day to really get into what makes the game what it is. You’ll be able to set up your tent, place your accompanying villagers, but until you get into that second day, there isn’t a whole lot to do apart from resource gathering. Thankfully, a few days in, you will start to grasp what Animal Crossing is all about, and each subsequent day will see the ability to lay new bridges, explore your island with friends, gain more shops, and fill up your island to its maximum ten villagers for a special treat and appearance by an AC fan-favorite. Animal Crossing is meant to be a fairly slow and methodical experience, so it’s likely you won’t see the fruit of your efforts appear for several days, or even weeks, depending on your ambitions to craft the island of your dreams.
While New Horizons doesn’t bring a grand sweeping change to every core system, it does enough new things to make it feel worthwhile for a whole new adventure. Apart from the much-improved visuals, you can now place your initial villager’s homes wherever you like, wear a series of back items like satchels, purses, or backpacks, and have far more freedom in how you can place and move items around the island, with some mixed results. There are also a few other new gameplay systems, features, and online shenanigans that I’ll be discussing further, so let’s continue.
Tom Nook is back and is ready to have you racking up your debt as he upgrades your house in a variety of different ways, with each loan being bigger than the previous one. You can even remodel your house as well, giving you varying options such as roof color, mailbox type, or even a change in your door or siding. Tom Nook thankfully doesn’t collect interest or late fees, so you can take as long as you want to pay off your loan, but know that the bigger your house gets with more rooms and floors, the more storage you’ll have, so it pays to keep those upgrades coming. You can also request and pay for bridges or inclines to reach new areas of the island to plant down more houses or expand your island further, without the need for ladders or vaulting poles, a pair of tools that greatly help you traverse these previously unreachable areas early on.
Apart from Bells, you’ll have Nook MIles to earn, another currency that is rewarded to you by completing a series of goals like upgrading your house, catching insects, how many tools have broken during use, or a dozen more that come with time. You’ll also earn more rapid amounts of miles with smaller bite-size tasks like crafting and selling a hot item, completing some DIY recipes, or taking a snapshot with your Nook phone, a device that allows you to check on your nook mile progress, keep in touch with friends, pull up your map, or create new designs for paths or clothing.
While the Nook phone is a very quick and intuitive device meant to offer a wide range of gameplay systems, it does mean that certain NPC’s from the series’ past who offered those services may not see a return, or maybe they will arrive on the island and further enhance those features in another way. What I really enjoy about the Nook Miles system, more so than I initially had imagined, is that it gives you purpose in a game that more or less is about complete freedom from the get-go. By having these missions and micro-tasks, it gives you small attainable goals that enhance the experience and put you on the path to making your island everything you want it to be.
Villagers will make a huge impact on your enjoyment of the game and with hundreds of them with varying personality types, finding that perfect mix to keep your town happy can be quite the task. While you’ll start with a few villagers right off the start, you’ll seek out to track down more or see random newcomers plunk down without your say so. While there are ways to ignore them and see that they have a miserable time on your island, there is no direct way to remove them apart from Amiibo cards, bringing in a character via the card and then completing a series of tasks for them to replace any villager you want to see go. Apart from those you want to see pack their bags, there is a lot of charm to its cast of characters and fun interactions you can have with them, often seeing a gift come your way that isn’t from one of the hundreds of floating balloons that pepper the sky. With new interactions to take part in, from clapping to cheering, to crying and laughing, you can also stumble into their house during the day and possibly learn a new recipe to craft as well, giving each villager a moment to shine.
Where Animal Crossing: New Horizons succeeds more so than its previous iterations is in the customization options you have available here. In previous games, you could set down paths through customizable designs that you could share with friends. While those paths are still compatible here in New Horizons, you’ll eventually unlock the ability to lay down more detailed and intricate paths like stone, brick, or terra-cotta, and even dirt paths that you can plant flowers and trees onto. Paths also have varying footstep sounds to further immerse yourself into your new home. While I had originally laid down some custom paths I found online that added a nice stone surface with stair patterns, I was highly addicted to the terra-cotta path and ended up repathing my entire island because of it, a feat that took literal days once I decided to go even further and use the terraforming tools to shape my rivers and ground, giving each of my villager’s large open yards and living spaces, not to mention a fishing hole surrounded by massive waterfalls. Animal Crossing was always a time sink, but New Horizons doubles down and somehow is even more so.
Now, while these things are really impressive, because they truly are, I certainly have a lot of issues with the mechanics of how you use these tools and is frankly, something that really should have seen an update to make the game’s controls more intuitive. Animal Crossing works off a small straight-in-front-of-you reach, with a very direct line of what you can interact with and what you’ll grab within reach, meaning if your angle is even the slightest pixel off, you’ll end up grabbing that rare flower off its stems, grasping at air, or shoving a patch of imperial fence down your pockets when you were simply trying to lay down more paths or cut into the ground to make that river just a tad bit wider. The game doesn’t give you any sort of visual indicator of what your character is going to reach for, apart from gifts or resources if you stand still long enough in front of them. It can certainly make collecting, crafting, and construction needlessly annoying when they appear to be looking ahead only to grab everything around them instead of picking up that small patch of pathing you just laid down. It’s easy my biggest gripe of the game as it is something that is constant throughout any gameplay aspect the game demands of you. While you can slowly move your character in the proper direction to ensure you interact with the desired object, it’s unfortunate that the tools were not better to make building and construction a bit snappier.
While I’ve easily sunk over 150+ hours into my island, there are some things that still get in the way of the fun. Inventory management and various menus are cumbersome and clunky to navigate, and with such small stacking amounts to some resources, you’ll fill up your space in no time, making it a chore to collect even the most basic things. There are also weird things like wanting to use fruit to build up your strength to uproot full trees or smash rocks, and you can only eat one of them at a time, but turnips can be consumed in a gulp of ten if you choose. There is also an annoying animation to hoisting your tool above your head when you just want to quickly select through your tools that can get rather annoying after a while. There are also the constant talkative prompts of catching the same bug or fish for the 100th time, to having to push through the same conversations with a character that you have already had a hundred times with already, such as wanting to donate more than one fossil at a time and then having to sit through the options to donate them after the fact.
As you complete a series of Nook Miles tasks, you’ll earn Nook Miles currency to purchase a series of designs and items, as is the case with earning bells and spending them at various shops that eventually open up around the island. One item you are required to buy with Miles are Nook Miles Tickets, which grants you access to randomized islands nearby. These islands are fantastic for resources or for discovering new villagers should you have room for them. What Nook Islands are also good for are hunting down expensive bugs and fish, such as devoting an hour or so to uprooting trees and other bug-centric objects to summon tarantulas after 7 pm to bag them for a 12k profit when Flick comes around town. The Nook Miles islands are usually a fun time, but the recent change in the bug table has meant spider farming is a tad harder due to water bugs showing up and ruining the spawn for the next few months. Regardless, these little escapes are really enjoyable and give you a ton of new areas to explore and exploit for bells.
Multiplayer was first introduced in Animal Crossing: Wide World and made a bit better in New Leaf, but New Horizons bumps up the 4-player sessions to being able to invite 7 other villagers to join you on your island. Here, you can put on fishing competitions to just running around hitting each other with nets as unlike previous versions, New Horizons doesn’t ship with any sort of real mini-games. New Horizons also lets you have 8 local players live on one island, but control of the island and several features are only allowed by the host player, making local co-op to feel far too limiting. This also caused a lot of controversy as only one island can be created per Switch, so those wanting an island all their own will have to purchase a Switch for themselves. Four households of multiple Animal Crossing fans, this can be devastatingly costly. This mode can be played by 8 players, but only 4 at a time, each having their own controller and dependant on where the host player is at on the screen. As I said, it’s a very limiting mode that can be fun under the right circumstances, but it certainly is not the best way to play New Horizons by a longshot.
Online multiplayer is far better but is plagued by a ton of bizarre choices that can certainly put a downpour on the fun as well. First, connecting and traveling to an island, or accepting visitors is plagued by several menus and is not a quick affair. To visit or host other players, you either need to add them as Switch friends or generate a dodo code, something that is almost a dozen menu prompts deep. Also, should you have a dodo code to enter and it ends up not working and you have to enter in a replacement one, you need to go through all the prompts all over again as there is no “enter a new dodo code” option anywhere. The menu systems for anything regarding dodo airlines is a navigational mess and could have been simplified to make it far quicker. Now, once you’ve generated a dodo code or the option to visit someone, you’ll have an animation and loading screen, depending on if you’re the visitor or the visitee of someone arriving at the island, complete with a loading screen that is around 30 seconds long. Now, should you have 7 friends visiting, 6 of those players, including yourself, will have to stop what they doing, back out of any menus or conversations with other villagers and sit through almost 4 minutes of loading screens, and that’s if everyone is ready to join, to say nothing of the busy signals everyone else is getting when you are trying to join that person’s island while someone else is setting up their transportation there. Should the network drop, which it has several times, you’ll have to invite everyone back and go through the same process all over again, to say nothing of seeing the exit animations for each player as well. While there is an end session function, which removes all online players, it currently has been glitched and is not saving progress of what took place. While it is really fun playing with a group of players online, the systems designed on making it happen feel stunningly archaic, even for Nintendo.
Now, when you visit an island, you won’t be able to do a few things, and this is true for the host as well as the visitor. You can’t decorate your town to the same degree as when you didn’t have your gates open, or access the shop inside the town center while you are hosting. Visiting players cannot use most tools unless they are made best friends, but even then some light customization still blocks much of the enjoyment of wanting to have players over. While some systems are set up to prevent griefing or trolling other players, it’s bizarre that some options are even blocked among having your best buds online. Again, I’ve had a fantastic time with what you CAN do online, but it certainly makes you wonder why a modern Switch game has some of the same limitations set by its DS counterparts from years and years ago.
Being New Horizons is the first console main series Animal Crossing title since 2008, the visuals really needed to be something special to distance it from the previous handheld release in New Leaf. Thankfully, New Horizons does the console series right and is frankly a gorgeous Animal Crossing experience in almost every way. Everything from small details like cherry blossom petals floating down the river, to amazing sunsets, to seeing the moon reflect on your stone pathing, there is a fantastic amount of small details that satisfy on a visual level. Characters and objects still have that AC charm and some furniture and household items really do have a nice bit of detail, especially the Imperial series, a favorite of mine. All in all, there are a ton of items to collect and craft that will get you on the path to creating that little slice of life as you makeshift small micro-communities and give not just your home, but each yard you craft for your villagers, a sense of purpose to them. Now, my only complaint with many of the items, actually, almost all of them, is that unless they are a chair, you’re unable to really interact with them, apart from musical items like a piano or guitar. This means setting down exercise equipment is largely just for show, and despite your best efforts to craft a lovely little cafe, the best you’ll get is a villager hopefully sitting there, ignoring that wonderful tea set you’ve so lovingly placed. Another issue with the items is that most items, especially fences, have an invisible gap wall to them, making it somewhat annoying to have small gaps when there is clearly enough room to nudge that street lamp just an extra few inches. Items can also only be rotated 90 degrees, and cannot be angled in any way, but that is a small nitpick in the grand scheme of things since we can finally move items over a half step, instead of a full square over, gap excluding.
Much like previous versions, you can freely design clothes and different artistic textures to use to your heart’s content. While there is a touch screen on the Switch, it’s rather odd that you cannot use a stylus to create designs freely with it. Regardless, the design features here are pretty decent and the game is fully compatible with QR codes from previous games, but will use the Nintendo Online Smartphone App to import them into the game, along with voice chat for you and your friends. While QR codes work in New Horizons, the game instead will use design codes for anything new, as well as designer codes for seeing what a particular author has in their library. The creative possibilities of what people have come up with is immense and having a previous game’s entire creative catalog compatible with the game means there are already thousands of designs ready and waiting for you.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is certainly rough around the edges when it comes to some game design choices and its online structure, but many of its imperfections are not just par for the course for the series, but part of its identity. I can understand why certain things have stuck around, but the nonsense of a dozen menus for a singular system is bizarre and just doesn’t make any sense at all. While I do have a lot of issues with the game, I’ve logged in over 150 hours on my Switch and counting, so while I’ve made my peace with some of these issues, I cannot deny how addictive and engaging this game really is. While much of the attention the game is getting is largely due to the world needing something like it right now, given the current world crisis, it has been some time since Animal Crossing has been on a home Nintendo Console in an official capacity. New Horizons made not be perfect, but it certainly is a great way to spend these extended vacation days, forced or otherwise.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was purchased by the reviewer and played on a Nintendo Switch.
All screenshots were taken on a Nintendo Switch.