76 Reviews liked by AttackFrog
Every step forward comes with a caveat. The terraforming grants you greater freedom than ever, but you don’t get it until like 20-30 hours in, long after you’ve gathered all your residents and planned out your infrastructure. The only thing you can dig up this time is fossils. There’s more freedom in how you plan out your town, but it also takes way longer to get even basic stuff like the clothing store, and there’s far less permanent vendors and locations than New Leaf in general. You can put stuff outside now, but it comes with a shitty crafting system that also makes your tools break multiple times per session if you play for any length of time.
Not only do you then have to make a new tool, but you have to make the “flimsy” version to then make the proper one, and there’s no way to make things in bulk or automate the process or anything that would make the whole thing less tedious. One of the worst crafting systems I’ve seen in ages. The phone is a neat idea but there’s ultimately not that much you can do with it. Conversations with villagers feel robotic and repetitive compared to former entries, though they’ve been getting better with updates. Lots of game-as-a-service type trends like daily challenges that just don’t really add much to the game.
Ultimately, it’s still Animal Crossing, and there’s definitely good times to be had here. Once you get all the “endgame” stuff around 30hrs in it’s a decent enough time killer. But the the slow drip feed, both in terms of progressing your game and in the adding of content (most of these games have shipped feature complete and you could mess with your consoles clock to see stuff from other seasons and such, but they’re being added bit by bit through updates here), and the general lack of features compared to New Leaf makes this a somewhat underwhelming entry.
Not only do you then have to make a new tool, but you have to make the “flimsy” version to then make the proper one, and there’s no way to make things in bulk or automate the process or anything that would make the whole thing less tedious. One of the worst crafting systems I’ve seen in ages. The phone is a neat idea but there’s ultimately not that much you can do with it. Conversations with villagers feel robotic and repetitive compared to former entries, though they’ve been getting better with updates. Lots of game-as-a-service type trends like daily challenges that just don’t really add much to the game.
Ultimately, it’s still Animal Crossing, and there’s definitely good times to be had here. Once you get all the “endgame” stuff around 30hrs in it’s a decent enough time killer. But the the slow drip feed, both in terms of progressing your game and in the adding of content (most of these games have shipped feature complete and you could mess with your consoles clock to see stuff from other seasons and such, but they’re being added bit by bit through updates here), and the general lack of features compared to New Leaf makes this a somewhat underwhelming entry.