I have stepped away from my PC to play a game I thought would pull me back to my roots and revitalize another platform, I almost bought a switch for this game... Here is my first 48 hours playing a console in over 6 years.
This is a 5 hour early access indie game with $12mil of funding sold as a full $60 40 hour game but only cost them $4k.
Nintendo has sold:
12mil sold by March 23, 2020 or $720m.
(Minimum because Nintendo is strict about selling at games at $60. This is not including bundle deals and extra switches sold because of nostalgic games)
My first impression:
24 hours in (no cheats)
Wow this is really chill and fun.
32 hours in (no cheats)
I'm really bored and have no idea what to do.
42 hours in (cheated)
I found substance, won and realized if I waited to win I would have just wasted even more of my life.
4 hours later
This review:
The Good parts of the Game:
Really cute.
Pretty screenshots to share when you can't go on vacation (but I'd suggest just playing Breath of the Wild or Witcher 3 (*PC) for that.)
It's a great pick up line at the bar... Or on tinder if you're stuck in the social distancing.
It's a good interactive screensaver.
You can be a trap or who ever you want to be. Gender is not limited to your avatars choice.
The Bad parts of the Game:
Artistic Review:
I'm starting with the more picky critiques and some of these, only experienced environment artists and level designers understand.
First off, Tree textures are lazy AF. They couldn't even bother to rotate the trees and/or alternate the uv maps on the model. They can't even make altered colors, or slightly unique designs.
In fact most of the foliage is like this.
The Grass texture is lazy design. This is more of a game artist critique however I noticed the absolutely clever triangular design they originally had is covered by this textured noise to help hide the poorly done textured seams from each tile.
AND this is the BEST texture made, out of the 4 unique ground textures.
*They did not even add in unique biomes with shades of grass throughout the map.
Sand, Cliff Face and Rock has no artistic flair (like the triangles in the grass), the textures just look like a premade asset they slapped on because "pretty" or hey, they looked good in pokemon.
Water is a lazy noise placed under a vertically moving alpha plane over a blue water material. There are about 5ish sea foam textures which is more effort than they seem to put into this.
The sky. A talented artist once told me "to recognize good media by the quality of the clouds". This makes sense as if you spend money on a background asset such as clouds then you are dedicated to making quality content. Animal Crossing CLOUDS are laughably bad. It's an ugly texture on a flat plane.
All the assets are taken from a previously made game, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. (If they say otherwise then yes, an artist may have had to "resize and rotate" the textures then yes)
Ex: why are all the clams, conch, coral all made the same. The animal crates aren't unique to each other outside of the bucket, aquarium and Tub.
These assets are not wrong, it's that you paid $60 for an asset that already existed and didn't even get expanded on.
I could go on more about the assets but I guess that can be your one goal of the game, to hoard them all.
They couldn't even be bothered to give gyroids to collect. Just saying, tons of missing collectable content.
Gameplay:
Or the lack of.
Games tend to have a goal: Hoard everything.
This is not a Game? It's a Chore. It's not a simulator, it's not an adventure game (ok if you call jumping across a river adventure to just get to more things that already exsist on your side of the river.)
It's not even collecting everything as the only reward for obtaining everything that could be obtained is to show it off like a hoarding package in.
And you can't see what each item looks like in the inventory so you have to drop everything to see what it looks like.
Game play loop: grind. Everything is based around the extremely monotonous task of collecting wood, iron/stone, fish/bugs. That's only an early game. Late game all you need is iron/gold because you can buy any wooden tools.
Mostly you need these to upgrade things which then get locked behind the time wall.
This is a 5 hour early access indie game with $12mil of funding sold as a full $60 40 hour game.
Everything in this game artificially is to extend game play time.
Crafting is taken from pocket camp and is also in tom nook's house until you can make your diy workbench which takes the first half of the game to make.
Storage. Nothing despawns (as far as I've know playing for 2 days. Fruit will go bad if you time travel into the future or past)
There is no point.
And if you're ok with that it's ok. But I'm not having fun. I feel ripped off and scammed of my money.
The biggest thing that holds you back is just playing to complete an unfinished game.
Mechanical
This game could have been made by 4 people, 48 hours, with access to all the art assets, and a copy of Unity Engine (or whatever engine this was) and still have made a better product.
Why have they not solved the time issue? This is already a relavent issue, how could they not have solved this. It's not that it's an easy problem to fix, it's that it's insulting. They are threatening to ban people for their lazy programming.
I know the duplication glitch is a bug and I can understand if it slipped through the cracks...
But unfortunately it seems to be the most skilled based objective in the game, requiring timing and knowledge, is a massive glitch in the game. Even messing it up offers more interesting challenges than anything this game offers.
**But the game has been out for 3 days and no updates (corona virus has been out so I'm assuming 12 million playtesters and no programmers to fix for the day 1 patch... There is a PR team crying in Nintendo offices.)
The load times are arbitrarily long. The button layout is confusing and doesn't flow. This may just be me but to search my phone or inventory it's in two vastly different locations. Again very minor issues. But even the wheel feels clunky and is no fun to use.
Ever go into the local multiplayer, well you can switch the user without closing the software by promoting the other user to leader and returning to the game.
Random Generation is highly controlled if at all. There are only about 5 unique islands after visiting 20 of them. Unless they plan to add more or I am missing a village that unlocks more unique islands, that's sad.
Bugs
Foreground Tree shadow doesn't disappear when you look in your menu. Flowers, the lady bug is just a gif on a transparent plane. (Well optimized but stolen completely from mobile no need for that lazy of an animation on a switch game.)
They included a shift around items... But it's also very clunky to use as I more often than not get stuck or shift somewhere when I don't want to.
I can't say much outside of these minor critiques, the game is actually bug free... But as I've noticed this is similar to the mobile game which has been "beta tested" as well as it being an EXTREMELY simple game.
It's as if they didn't care about the game. Or worse whoever designed this didn't even play the old games before. Like time skipping wasn't even addressed, and you can't tell me that the programmers on the game cube were more advanced than the once on a switch.
Time Traveling:
You are unaffected as of this post except for fruit spoiling. Going into the future or past will spoil your fruit. Otherwise there is no recordable elements as of now that will lock you out of any future events, which atm you can just go to the day of events such as Christmas you can get seasonal elements however more testing when on event comes up, seeing the lack of effort of this game I wouldn't be surprised if they just haven't gotten around to making event items.
Tom Nook in fact rewards you each time you advance in time by giving you nook miles.
Only thing villagers note if you travel too far into the future is that you went on vacation which is default text for passed time you haven't played.
Seasonal critters are available to catch at their alotted times.
Seasonal event that is Easter is programmed in with a letter and gift from mom.
Plants don't need watering, even in winter when it snows.
Lore.
There is none. If you never played any animal crossing game before, none of these characters outside of Tom Nook offer any interesting world building and even he is really padded from games before. Blabbers just spouts basic wikipedia info at you nothing that makes any your finding link to the world. Maybe the siblings offer something unique but I was too bored of reading the slow dialog to care, mind you the chat boxes are terribly laid out.
The characters are so two dimensional it's like playing in Nuke Town offline without bots.
Delayed 2019 release was going to be a much different game. It's speculated that the game was going to have microtransactions but because this was during the EA scandal and gambling laws being changed for youth on loot boxes and microtransactions this game had to redesign itself… well take out all the predator mechanics to suck money out of kids. Who knows if mobile and pocket camp were going to mix making it an external microtransactions scheme.
Now instead of paying to win you pay with your time wasted.
Game is designed to collecte cute things.
This is not a fun game, but if your life is too exciting and you need to be slowed down by garbage gameplay, constant barrage of chores and microtransactions nowadays then do I have a game for you. Animal Crossing: New Horizons "Let's see how much we can get away with" - Nintendo
www.reddit.com
