Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out in March earlier this year, but I’ve been an Animal Crossing fan since New Leaf. With that being said, New Horizons is a very different game and I think it’s time for a review.

The premise of the latest Animal Crossing installment is where you arrive on a deserted island with two animal villagers, a tanuki named Tom Nook asks you to pay back debt, and you’re off. Like other games in the franchise, New Horizons allows you to catch various types of fish, bugs, and sea creatures (as of the July update). You can design your house however you’d like, and you can become friends with the villagers. However, unlike previous installments, New Horizons adds a ton of new stuff to the game. There’s the new DIYs, which are little recipe cards you can learn which allow you to craft furniture and clothing. There’s the new nook mile point system, which your character can earn for doing simple tasks and then the points can be redeemed for things like more hairstyles, more pocket space, cool furniture, and more. And, you can now put furniture outside, allowing for much more customization opportunities compared to the previous games.

With all games, there’s good and bad, and New Horizons has a lot of good. It allowed me to experience Animal Crossing like never before. The overwhelming amount of customization takes my creative ability to a new level. I also like how they added more storage space in your house. I also liked how there were so many more clothing options than in all the previous games. It is also important to note that since Animal Crossing is such an open-ended game, so there are so many different types of players. For me, I’m someone who needs to collect everything. And, in Animal Crossing, that means ALL 80 fish, ALL 80 bugs, ALL 40 sea creatures (except the giant isopod. I haven’t caught that one yet..), basically, I get somewhat upset if I don’t have everything. That’s how I usually am in most games, to be fair. (think Breath of the Wild’s Koroks)

However, the game is not perfect. New Horizons has, instead of releasing the whole game at once, been putting out updates adding new content every so often. A lot of the ‘new’ content was just re-introducing of content from the previous game. Like diving, for example, that feature was only introduced in July, where I had been used to it in New Leaf since I got it. The other thing I didn’t like was that the villager dialogue is a lot drier than in all of the previous games, which can get really boring. Furthermore, the game got off to a really slow start, locking most of the features until you’re a few weeks in. And this is literal weeks, too, as in time in-real-life. When you’re as impatient as I am, that can get really frustrating. For me, I time travelled in the game (something which is a somewhat debated topic among animal crossing players) and I got everything much sooner.

Overall,  Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a really fun game. Despite my annoyances with the game, I truly think that there’s so much to do in the game that anyone can have fun with it. I’ve spent around 325 hours on it since March, so I say it was well worth it for $60.

…psst… if you wanna be my friend on switch, that’d be cool. my friend code is SW-3513-3060-9733

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