Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the follow-up to Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which released over seven years ago for the Nintendo 3DS. Players have been itching to get their hands on a new main series Animal Crossing game for years, especially given the mixed reception that the mobile spin-off Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, as well as Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival received. Now it's finally a reality, but can the game live up to such long-lived hype?
Animal Crossing: New Horizons follows a similar plot to its predecessor New Leaf, with some notable exceptions. Instead of visiting a full-fledged town and being pronounced its mayor, players are dropped off on a deserted island with nothing other than their wits, tools, and the support of Tom Nook's family to get them by. Instead of visiting existing shops and buildings, players start from scratch with nothing more than tents, and have to craft their way up to a full-fledged civilization.
Of course, building that civilization won't be easy. Animal Crossing has always been a bit of a collectathon, and New Horizons is no different. Players have to hunt down a myriad of supplies in order to craft necessary tools and build town buildings from scratch and to earn enough bells to pay for town projects and home expansions and improvements. Bug hunting, fishing, planting, and harvesting all come into play, as with prior series entries.
Part of what makes New Horizons stand out from New Leaf, though, is the player's ability to customize just about everything in their town. Initially, it's just small decisions like where to place buildings or which villagers to invite to join the island. But as the game progresses, the options become nearly limitless, culminating in a terraforming tool that lets players literally reshape the island as they see fit.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been in development since shortly after the last main series predecessor, New Leaf, wrapped up. The amount of time and polish the game has received is clearly evident. In addition to making full use of the Switch's graphical capabilities, New Horizons fixes a myriad of annoyances and problems that New Leaf had. One of the biggest problems fans had with New Leaf was that there was little control over what happened to the environment around them; villagers could move in and obliterate groves of trees and flowers, whether players wanted them or not. Now players have the ultimate say over where each villager moves in, and with the ability to simply pocket and relocate entire trees, the impact on landscaping is minimal at worst.
That's barely scratching the surface of quality of life improvements in New Horizons, however. Fish are more responsive to the presence of fishing lures, multiplayer limits have been increased tremendously, and running no longer destroys carefully-placed plants, instead only obliterating their blossoms after multiple runthroughs. Certain features are no longer hidden behind difficult-to-acquire NPCs and their services; for example, players can now specify what hairstyle, hair color, and overall appearance that they want from the start, and they gain the ability to change it up on the fly, with more - and easier to access - customization options appearing later on in the game. While these options are fairly standard fare for other games, considering New Leaf players had to leave their characters' appearance up to a random series of questions with no real way to specify exactly what they wanted, this improvement makes a big difference.
New Horizons also introduces the Nook Phone, which acts as the player's smartphone in-game. It makes accessing a variety of tools and information much easier, including the ability to communicate with friends both on and off one's island. It also introduces Nook Miles, which reward the player for completing a wide variety of tasks. It's enough to make even the most tedious tasks more rewarding, which is likely to keep the player coming back.
Of course, not everything about New Horizons is perfect. Multiplayer, in particular, has its drawbacks. Secondary players who share an island on the same Switch only get a small part of the Animal Crossing experience, with most of the responsibility and options left up to the first player of the session. Online and local play multiplayer is functional and enjoyable, but long loading sequences for each player that joins make it an extremely difficult process to actually bring in as many players as is possible in New Horizons. Multiplayer also creates a bit of a hassle for the main player of the island, as making any significant changes to the island - or even one's own home - becomes impossible while friends are visiting. However, perhaps in the most confusing decision on Nintendo's part is the lack of ability to craft multiple items at the same time, which means players have to watch the crafting animation over and over again, particularly causing problems with items like fish bait.
The introduction of breaking tools is also likely to displease some players. Akin to games like Breath of the Wild and Dead Rising, New Horizon's tools break down over time and have to be rebuilt from scratch. The needed supplies are almost always readily available, but it does eat up time that players could otherwise be using to actually play the game.
In the end, Animal Crossing: New Horizons refines the formula, but doesn't dramatically shake it up. This is still a laid-back game that ultimately lets the player choose what they're going to do at any given moment, but those choices are still primarily limited to what existed in the prior games. So if one thinks that collecting things, filling up a museum, and talking to cute animals isn't their cup of tea, chances are Animal Crossing: New Horizons won't be for them. But given the huge demand for Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Nintendo Switch consoles since its release, it's clear that New Horizons still has a large audience eager for just that kind of gameplay.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available now exclusively for the Nintendo Switch. Game ZXC was provided a code for this review.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the fifth major game in the Animal Crossing series. This slice-of-life simulation game tasks the player with developing an abandoned island into a small town for its resident villagers. The game was released at the start of worldwide lockdowns amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which catapulted it into massive success. It's currently the best selling game of all time in Japan.