Game Review: Animal Crossing New Horizons

I, like everyone else on this planet, am addicted to playing Animal Crossing. Although people like my brother would argue that the game is dull, poorly-designed, and infuriating (well-- that can be true, sometimes), I argue that the game is great for challenging your creativity and taking it to the next level.

Aside from Minecraft, very few videogames challenge you to rebuild a virtual world like Animal Crossing does. New Horizons takes what previous instalments attempted to do, and really forces you to create a bustling town from the ground up. It's very much a game of patience, especially in the first week: stuck on your deserted island, you're not able to do much, including explore the perimeters and cliffs of your island. Each day you unlock something new, whether it's the function to travel to randomly generated islands for materials, or gain the recipe for a ladder that lets you scale the forested hills surrounding your island.

Unlike previous games, e.g. New Leaf, New Horizons makes it extraordinarily more difficult to time travel. Which is sad for players like me, who loved the time travelling mechanic despite the fact some hardcore players consider it cheating, which I'll admit, it kind of is.

New Horizons not only makes time travelling difficult in this game, it makes a lot of other mechanics, too. Nothing is easy. I recently decided to rebuild my entire town from the ground up and turn it into Disneyland. Great idea until I realized I could only move one building per day, and it cost me 50 grand worth of bells to do so each time. Not a big deal except it requires a lot of patience.

The game is intense when it comes to the word PATIENCE. The amount of fun you get out of Animal Crossing is entirely derived from the player itself. It's not one of those games with constant thrills and stimulation. It requires a lot of waiting, hardwork, and effort to actually get the most of it. It's not a difficult game, but it's not easy or practical, either. Just take the Island Designer app as an example; it's not an efficient mechanic, and removing cliffs or adding lakes to your island takes time. Too much time, sometimes.

Although it's easy to get caught up in the simple ways that Animal Crossing: New Horizons could improve, it's easier to just get caught up in the simplistic fun of it. Designing your own island, having fun with your friends, creating new designs, catching fish. It's not for everyone, and I know a few people who gave up on the game after the first week, not understanding what fun is to be derived from it. But that's just the thing with Animal Crossing. The more effort you put in, the more fun you get out.