Animal Crossing: New Horizons - First Impressions

Before I go into my impressions of this game, I want to give a little background. When I was growing up, the top of the line system was the Atari 2600. My parents never got the original Nintendo when it came out in the summer of 1983, nor any time after that, so I was never really introduced to Nintendo growing up. By the time the Playstation / Nintendo "wars" started in the '90s, I had children of my own, so playing games was not a priority. That being said, understand that New Horizons is the first Animal Crossing game I have ever played, and that I am coming into this without any bias toward any company or system.

As a creative adult with a vivid imagination, New Horizons offers a beautiful world to express creativity. The colors, characters, and world are amazing. The biggest issues I have come across are either bugs in the game or small things that become big problems after a while.

The one bugs that caused me big heartache is the construction cleanup. The App tells you that it will send all furniture, items, or trees to the recycle bin, then it deletes your trees. That's a BIG bug. I lost a lot of bamboo tress, and have yet to find an island with bamboo on it again.

Another issue is the time gating. I don't understand the need for it. There are no micro-transactions in this game, so why make people wait a day to finish projects. According to my game savvy husband, it is to artificially inflate gameplay stats. That seems ridiculous to me. The people who love and play this game or going to do so whether they have to wait on projects or not. The time gating also came in the form of closing Resident Service on New Years Eve. There was absolutely no reason to do that at all. In fact, that probably lost a lot of playtime hours for Nintendo. I had no idea Resident Services was going to be closed, so I didn't prepare. Since I needed to use it, I simply didn't play all that day.

The other pet peeve I have with this game is the "follow the leader" style play they have for local co-op. The second player is completely useless. I understand that there are parents out there who want to let there children "play" without destroying things, but there are also people who would like to actually play with someone else on the same system. A simple solution would be to let the leader choose whether the other players can use tools. I understand that what Nintendo really wants is for every member of the household to own their own Switch and their own copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but that's not only impractical, with the way things are right now, it's impossible for most people.

Overall I love this game and the creativity it inspires. Some aspects seem to have been overlooked or developed more for $ than for customer experience. Even so, it's likely that I will continue playing, and continue overlooking the few flaws in favor of the wonderful overall experience.