The Game 2020 Needed: Animal Crossing New Horizons (Switch, 2020) Review

You may remember that last year, the world was subject to a global pandemic of the 19th COVID variety, causing businesses to shut down, economies to collapse, and most importantly, people having to quarantine in order to “flatten the curve” and stop the spread.

But up to that point, Nintendo would be working on a game that encouraged an overall community spirit of sorts, with the ability for players to travel to their friends’ places in a virtual world. A game that was the latest in a series of games starting on the GameCube and had been anticipated with the last game being released on the 3DS seven years prior.

Thus, on March 20, 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons released, at the perfect time. And on the same day as Doom Eternal.

To be honest, Animal Crossing as a series for the longest time was one I had very little experience with. I never owned the games on the GameCube, Wii or DS, and hadn’t even really heard of it until I became more invested in Nintendo games. I didn’t really understand what it was about and what it was like, or even if it was really my type of game.

The first Animal Crossing game I had ever actually played was New Leaf in 2016, which my friend recommended to me and I ended up buying with a $20 Walmart gift card I received for my Christmas. And surprisingly, it turned out to be a game I actually had a lot of fun with. For the first few months of owning it, I was practically returning to the game every day - it was pretty much one of those games I was always looking forward to playing after I was done with school. I liked the villager characters, I liked the feeling of setting up my own island and home and overall, even in a time I was trending towards PC gaming, New Leaf still managed to be a game I was addicted to and playing regularly.

That said, after those few months, I started to kind of… forget about returning to the game. I’m not sure what it was in particular, but I feel like after a while I was just kind of doing the same kinds of things every day and wasn’t really feeling as enticed to keep going back to it. Granted, at the time I was going through quite a few self-doubt issues, and that did prevent me from focusing on playing games at times (plus I also made my character a male and considering all of my gender questioning since 2017… yeah), but ultimately after a month or two I didn’t really find myself going back to New Leaf quite as much.

To an extent I kind of feel like Animal Crossing was a game I really had to “commit” myself to - at the least making sure to check in on my villagers at least every few days, but after taking so many long breaks from the game, I just felt like I had missed a lot, especially as villagers moved out and new ones moved in.

After that, I had tried playing some of the other games - including the original on GameCube - but after a few days would kind of just… forget about them.

Ultimately I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about New Horizons when it was announced. I was happy for Animal Crossing fans getting a new entry, but I was sort of just expecting it to end up being a similar situation like New Leaf where I would play it for a little while and then completely forget about going back to it. Well, there was that, and I didn’t have a Switch when it was announced, so…

But okay, point is I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to get Animal Crossing: New Horizons when it would be released. In 2019 I got my Nintendo Switch, and to be honest as more time went on I grew more interest in the game. Unfortunately it was delayed to the following year, but I did have more desire to play it, and when the game did release… well, honestly what I had been seeing of it made it seem so fun that I ultimately bit the bullet and bought it a few days after release.

And I’m really glad I did. In the past, I have seen the mentality where people say stuff along the lines of “for every dollar I spend, I expect one hour of gameplay,” and while that’s not a philosophy I personally hold (and honestly find pretty flawed), I will say if that is the case… let’s just say I could’ve bought this four times over and gotten my money’s worth.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is definitely the game I would say I’ve played most in both 2020 and 2021. I’ve mentioned in the past that it is my favorite and most played Nintendo Switch game, and on top of that it’s also one of my most played games in general. I’ve logged about 240 hours in the game - which is higher than any game I have on Steam and when it comes to games that record my hours played, it’s second to Overwatch which I have played about 500 hours of. Honestly, I didn’t really expect to play the game that much but… well, here we are.

But okay, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. I’ve never really talked about an Animal Crossing game in my reviews so… what’s it about?

Animal Crossing is a series of social simulation games where the player takes control of a human villager and interacts within a town of anthropomorphic animals, and can perform different activities like catching fish and bugs, and hunting fossils. The games don’t really have a determined end goal, but allow you to expand upon your house and village, and simulates the passage of time using the system’s internal clock and calendar. While the first game released worldwide on the GameCube, it was actually first released for the Nintendo 64 in Japan under the name of ‘Animal Forest’, which is what the series is still called over there.

New Horizons, being the newest mainline game in the series, carries over a lot of the gameplay from the previous games, but of course, builds on it in different ways. 

Obviously the graphics and visuals are much improved compared to New Leaf as well as Amiibo Festival, the previous Animal Crossing game of any sort that doesn’t exist. They’re definitely more colorful overall, the character models look smoother, and the environments definitely look more visually appealing - particularly in elements like the water and ground textures - while still holding true to the overall Animal Crossing art style. It really does look like a HD Animal Crossing game following up to the series’ seven year gap from the previous mainline entry.

But going back to the gameplay, the game is set differently compared to previous games. As opposed to being in a town/village, this game takes place on an island. You start out with two other villagers, but you’re able to invite more, build your own home, the museum, the Resident Services, the campsite and the Able Sisters’ clothing store. And you can decide where to place each of these.

On that note, the main thing improved from previous other games is customization.  Obviously this was an element available in previous games - you could change the “town tune” and have custom designs - but New Horizons takes it quite a few steps further. Coupled with the island setting, there’s now an ability to craft items, including your own tools, add bridges and inclines over areas of land, and terraform your island to add bodies of water and cliffs to your island to tweak the layout to your liking.

Your villager is also more customizable too. As opposed to previous games where your appearance was determined by a series of questions asked to you at the beginning, this game finally allows you to freely choose your hairstyle, eyes, mouth, nose, skin tone, and clothes from the start. In addition, ‘gender’ is referred to as a ‘style’, and ultimately the game allows for more gender-neutral options when it comes to customizing your character.

This is a feature I definitely really like. This feature was present in Happy Home Designer and Pocket Camp, but with the previous ‘core’ Animal Crossing games, I always would find myself searching online for what to say so I could get a look I like, and that aspect did kind of annoy me, so the game having these options available from the start is quite nice, honestly. Especially considering that you unlock the Able Sisters’ clothing store fairly early on so you can have more options for clothes earlier in the game. 

On top of that, the added skin tones and removing the ‘gendered’ styles and clothing do make the game feel more inclusive, and especially in a game that revolves around creating and controlling your own character, and ‘building’ your island to your own liking, is an addition that was definitely needed.

As a whole though, I think the new customization features, in addition to ones from previous games, are really what has me coming back to the game the most. While I do think the previous Animal Crossing games did allow me to feel ‘in touch’ with the village I was in, New Horizons expands upon that in a way that allows me to make the town I live in more of my ‘own.’ New Horizons isn’t just a social simulation game, but one with a lot of sandbox elements, and I really like it for that. 

I’ve seen some people do some incredible stuff with what New Horizons offers - making their islands feel even more alive with how they place furniture on top of the ability to build roads connecting everything around the island. In a lot of ways, it really does feel like something that can only really be done in New Horizons, and I personally do quite like the concept of being able to change my island to how I see fit with all of the options for furniture, crafting, and customization that New Horizons offers.

That said, I can understand this getting in the way for some people - mostly in terms of, well, tools. You can build and customize your own tools in the game, but with that comes… durability. 

Durability in games, or more often referred to weapon durability, refers to a mechanic where tools and weapons you use “wear” down over time, and eventually break, forcing you to find and/or craft new ones. An example of this would be Minecraft’s (vanilla) survival mode, where your pickaxe gradually loses ‘health’ as you mine, as does your sword the more you fight enemies. Similar scenario with, say, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

This is a mechanic that I do find pretty annoying in those games, but I feel like I can understand why they make sense for those types of games - it does add a layer of challenge where you have to consider what you have and if you have the tools needed to fight enemies, and from there be able to fall back on other weapons if the one you’re using was to break.

But they added that to this game, and honestly it really just feels like a cheap way to force the player into using the ‘crafting’ system. Keep in mind, this really isn’t a game where survival is a core concern - this is Animal Crossing. The worst case scenario is that you might find a tarantula walking around and if that bites you, you pass out and reset to your home. Or wasps can sting you if their nest falls out of a tree. 

Even then though, having strong weapons doesn’t really come into play there, and most of the time, the tool durability just kind of comes off as more of an annoyance than a compelling gameplay mechanic. I’m in the middle of digging up fossils when suddenly… my shovel breaks! So I just grab some materials and craft a new one until that breaks. Or I can just go buy one at Nook’s Cranny. But it doesn’t add any challenge to the game and just kind of comes off as a pace breaker. 

The least the game could do is provide the tools with a ‘health’ bar like other games that have this mechanic so that you know when to replace your tool instead of just having it disappear on you, but it doesn’t even really do that. It just comes off as an unnecessary mechanic that doesn’t add anything to the game other than annoyance.

Another criticism I have of the crafting aspect that this game offers is that, sometimes when I want to craft a certain piece of furniture, the game doesn’t exactly give me access to what I need to craft it. 

For example, I obtained recipes for an Ironwood Cupboard and an Ironwood Kitchenette. I thought they looked nice, so I wanted to build one. But both of them require an Ironwood Dresser, and that’s a problem because I don’t have an Ironwood Dresser, and I can’t buy one from Nook’s Cranny or Nook Shopping. No, I need to get the crafting recipe for it, which I can get from snooty villagers. But okay, I try to go to the homes of who counts as a ‘snooty’ villager on my island, but they don’t give me the recipe. And when I check every day for a recipe bottle on the beach - well, guess what, I haven’t been able to obtain it there either. So, for the foreseeable future, I’m not able to build those items because I don’t own an Ironwood Dresser or the DIY recipe to craft one.

And recently, with the 2.0 update bringing the ability to make food, I’ve wanted to try creating some of the recipes, but for many of them, I need flour, which I can only get with wheat. But even after donating to start Leif’s co-op (another part of the update), I haven’t seen him sell any wheat starts, and I can’t find it when going to other islands either, so again - I’m out of luck. I guess it is meant to encourage inviting friends to your island, but… lol i don’t have friends.

Speaking of which, even with all the new crafting and customization features, this game is still a social simulation at it’s core. Like previous games, up to 10 other anthropomorphic villagers can reside on your island, all with different personality types and species. You can interact with them - talk to them, give them gifts, and in some cases they’ll ask you to get them certain items, give you certain items (including DIY recipes in this game), sell you items, buy items off of you… that sort of thing. They may also send you letters, often including gifts. Plus, as of the game’s 2.0 update, they can also visit your house, sometimes commenting on your furniture and overall layout.

I have heard some people state that compared to previous games, the villagers lack personality, and I can understand that. After playing this game for so long, you may notice that certain villagers will just kind of say the same kinds of things when you talk to them, and on top of that, I don’t feel like this game does enough to separate characters of the same personality type. Some of them do have different hobbies, but you may notice that if you have characters of the same personality type, they’ll often say the exact same things as each other. Sometimes I even notice that a character repeats the exact same line of dialogue right after talking to a different character with the same personality type.

That said, I still feel like the game’s NPCs give the game a sense of community, especially when I’m playing on my own without having any friends over to my island. I don’t know what it is, but I often do find myself invested in my village and the interactions with my other villagers as if they’re… real people, in a way. I mean, they’re obviously not a substitute for actual human interaction, but at the same time, interacting with them can just be… pretty nice. I mentioned in my Switch 2-year retrospective that it does sort of give me a good feeling when I get a letter from one of my villagers about how I’m a good friend, which still holds true, even if it does make me sound like a loser.

I also like the touch of villagers having conversations with each other, with reactions stemming from that (sometimes to the point of villagers pissing off another), and in some cases, you may have to deliver gifts from one villager to another for certain reasons. These were things present in previous Animal Crossing games, and it makes it’s return here, and it really helps to add another layer of personality to the villagers in the game, as well as the aspect of how villagers may react to certain types of gifts.

Of course, some villagers may choose to leave your island, and while in this game they will tell you directly and you can ask them to stay (whereas I remember in New Leaf some villagers would just decide to leave out of the blue and leave you a letter behind), I still often find myself letting them go and do their own thing. I dunno, an aspect I do really like about this game is just seeing villagers come and go, and being able to “meet” other characters with potentially different personalities and/or species to add some variety to my island. That said Bangle is an adorable cinnamon roll and I will never let her leave my island even if she asks. Which she hasn’t but you get my gist.

But overall, I do think the villagers in this game still play a big part in the sense of community, as they do in the rest of the games. They’re definitely a really big part of Animal Crossing as a series, just by making the town/island feel so… alive. There’s so many different villages too, which really helps add to the variety, so it’s fun just to see what villagers come to my island, and who I can meet at the campsite or other islands.

And that’s not the only part of it - you can also invite friends over to your island or visit them at their island through the DAL airport, and this game does encourage that. Sometimes you receive DIY recipes that you’ve already obtained from other villagers or in bottles on the beaches, and while you can sell these at Nook’s Cranny, you are often told that you should share these with other people. But you can’t share them with other villagers, rather the intention is for the player to share these recipes with their friends. 

And on top of that, you can also give them gifts and send them messages - and also leave them messages on their announcement board if they invite you over to your island. You can also have up to eight different players live on your island, although this game does have one problem where you can only have one island per system, so if you only have one Switch in your household with multiple family members, you’re out of luck if you want an island to yourself.

One thing I haven’t really talked about so far is that this game does feature some integration with modern technology. In the game, your player now sports a “NookPhone”, an in-game smartphone with different apps relating to the gameplay. For example, the Critterpedia app, where if you catch a fish, bug or sea creature, it will be logged in an “encyclopedia” that displays information about all the creatures that you have caught, and on top of that, a “stamp” will be added next to their names if you have donated them to Blathers’ museum.

The NookPhone is also where all your DIY recipes are stored, as well as the Nook Miles app, in which you are rewarded “points” if you do certain activities each day, which you can redeem for items at the Resident Services building - a nice little feature that encourages returning to the game. Among other things though, this element of the game also uses features that encourage both playing with friends, sharing to social media, or just utilizing the game’s online features in other ways. When you use multiplayer, you unlock the ‘Best Friends’ list and Chat log, the former of which allows you to mark, well, best friends that you’ve played with and tells you if they are online.

The custom designs app is another one that allows you to not only view, create and edit your own designs, but also download designs that others have created over the internet. You can also choose to redeem Nook Miles for the “pro” version of the app, which allows for creating designs with specific purposes - particularly for certain types of clothing and furniture.

But on top of that, if you have the Nintendo Switch Online app downloaded to your mobile device and sign into your Switch online account, you can also access a “NookApp” within it that carries over information from your save. But you can also use it to scan previously created designs from New Leaf and Happy Home Designer and add them to New Horizons. But there’s also websites that you can use to import your own photos, or just create designs on your computer, and scan them into New Horizons. I’m not sure if they’re, well, official, and if you do scan in photos, they will be compressed to fit within a ‘pattern’, but it is still a cool albeit unofficial feature to have access to, and I quite like being able to bring my own drawings into New Horizons for that added bit of personalization.

There’s also the in-game “Camera” app which allows you to take screenshots with options to pan and zoom in addition to having different filters and borders to add some artistic flair. Combined with the Switch’s already existing “capture” feature, this allows you to share your screenshots to social media - once again incorporating new technologies while building off of features in previous games. This was sort of a thing in previous titles, but they definitely didn’t give you the options that were available here. The 2.0 update also adds a ‘pro’ option that adds the ability to take ‘handheld’ and ‘tripod’ shots for additional viewing angles.

But you get the gist - this game does have a lot of features going for it that incorporate new technologies to really advance the social features established in previous games. The additions to the camera feature, the NookPhone, the NookApp, and overall integration with the Switch’s friend feature and modern technology. Which in of itself basically led to other fan sites designed for things like creating custom designs, or selling and exchanging in-game items. I mean, remember when people were literally scalping villagers, particularly Raymond, for bells? Good times man, good times. Or maybe not so good times.

Either way, this is really where this game shines. I’ve repeatedly talked about 2020 and the global pandemic that crippled the world and forced many to quarantine, and the reason why I consider this to be ‘the game 2020 needed’ is, well, because of that. This game came out just around the start of quarantine, and in a time where human interaction was basically limited as a result, this game did give that sense of community, whether that be within your own island and the NPCs you were able to talk to or visiting other friends over the internet. Combine that with the abilities to craft, customize your island, and the game’s incentives for the player to return, you had a game that was practically made to give a sense of community when it was needed most.

And on that note, I’d say it worked really well. Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a massive commercial success - not just the best selling Animal Crossing game, or even just the second best selling game on the Switch, but as of now, it’s the fifteenth best selling game of all time. And for a while, it felt like *everyone* was playing this game. I can definitely tell you there was a good period of time where most of my Switch friends list were online and playing the game, and people were talking about it everywhere. And while this would have still been a great release regardless, the fact that it achieved a lot of good social interaction within the global pandemic, does make it a tad more special.

Granted, for some people, it did sort of fall off, and to an extent, I can’t necessarily say I blame them. The game sort of lacked a lot of content and quality of life features that were in previous titles, particularly New Leaf, and while a lot of that was made available through updates, I can understand that by then many weren’t as compelled to return to the game.

But I can say for myself that, especially as someone who sort of just fell off from New Leaf, I definitely find myself returning to this game a lot more often than I thought I would. The game adds a lot more interactivity, customization and freedom to the core Animal Crossing gameplay, and for me, that’s what keeps me coming back to the game. I can definitely say that I come back to this game almost daily - I do take breaks occasionally when I’m feeling somewhat burned out, but when I go back to this game, I definitely have a lot of fun with it. 

I just really enjoy interacting with my villagers and other NPCs, and I also like customizing my island, looking for fossils to sell, and so on and so forth. I also like participating in the events that take place within the game, and especially with the recent 2.0 update, the game does offer me a lot that compels me to return to it. To an extent, it actually made me more interested in going back and trying the other Animal Crossing games - including New Leaf to see what I missed out on. There’s a lot I enjoy about this game, and while it’s not perfect, it’s definitely one I enjoy quite a lot and generally have a good time whenever I return to it.

Conclusion

Animal Crossing: New Horizons isn’t a perfect game, but with the features that it does add to the series’ core formula, combined with the timing of its release, it is a game I really like, and I still do consider it to be my favorite (original) game on the Nintendo Switch, and at least on my Top 10 favorite games of all time. I do really enjoy going back to it, and considering how much faster I fell off of New Leaf, it really says something with how I still find myself returning to New Horizons over a year and a half later with over 240 hours logged into it.

It isn’t a game for everyone, and there are valid criticisms of it, but at the same time, I do still greatly enjoy it, and can also definitely recommend it if you own a Switch. It’s a new favorite of mine, and it offers quite a bit to do and good incentives to return, especially with the major updates that have been added since it’s release. It may not be your cup of tea, but if what I described throughout this review does interest you on any level, I’d say it’s worth trying.