Animal Crossing: New Horizons
The Best Game On The Switch?
The most highly anticipated game of the year has been out on switch for nearly a month now and has helped us all through this quarantine period. But how good is it? Well lets go over the positives and negatives of the game and see how it matches against the elite switch games..
Positives:
The graphics: Starting with possibly my favourite upgrade from the 3DS outing, the graphical quality is sublime and apart from maybe The legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, it might be my favourite looking game on the switch. From the water sparkling in the 5pm sunset, to the starry skies where you can see some shooting stars with your fellow islanders. Speaking of your islanders... Colourful Characters: As soon as you start the game you are greeted with the charming Timmy and Tommy. Then as you arrive on the island you find out who your two starting neighbors are, and you meet the ever charismatic Tom Nook. However its the little conversations you hav with you fellow islanders which really add to the game's overall charm and entertainment. Sometimes they might even argue between themselves with silly insults that they then ask you to decide the winner of. The crafting system: Probably the biggest addition to the game is the brand new crafting system which has completely changed the way we play the game. It adds brand new daily chores such as harvesting wood from trees to make chairs, benches, beds etc. or getting all the stone, clay and iron from the rocks. It makes it easy to get the furniture you want because as long as you have the diy recipes for the specific item (which aren't hard to come by) you just need the materials which are also in high supply (unless you've cut down all your trees that is). But what I am saying is that there is always something you can be doing. Nook Miles: The Nook Miles program is a great achievement like system that allows you to get rewarded for things like catching 100 fish or crafting 50 furniture items. They are things that you would do on a day-to-day basis. What can you spend these items on you ask? Well you can buy furniture (more specifically outdoor furniture such as hot tubs and fountains), clothes, upgrade your storage, buy new haircuts and more. This system does two things great: they give you something to work towards, like challenges, and they also reward you for things that you do anyway or maybe didn't even mean to do. For example you get rewarded miles for being stung by bees, or shooting down a present but it lands in the sea or river. You can also buy nook miles tickets which leads perfectly into my final point...
The Airport: The airport is one of the most underrated additions to the game in my opinion because it gives you the option to visit different mystery islands, your friends islands and allows you to send postcards/gifts to friends or other islanders. The main point here are the mystery islands which are islands that you can visit for 2000 miles and depending on which one you get, can have rarer fruits, flowers, fish and bugs. There are specific islands that have become famous for being very easy to make money off. The most well-known is tarantula island which is a specific island that when you clear the whole island (they aren't that big) of any trees, flowers and rocks and then as long as it is nighttime and you are in a month where tarantulas can spawn, the only thing that can spawn are tarantulas and at 8000 bells a piece, it is very easy to make lots of money from one trip. There are plenty of other great islands so here is a full list of the islands plus their contents by the Youtuber TagBackTV (check out his channel) https://wuffs.org/acnh/mysterytour.html.
Negatives
Now even though there is only one of them, it is quite a large problem
Tools Breaking: Probably the one of the most universally hated things about this game. The fact your tools break makes sense to start off with because you have simple flimsy tools, it makes sense for those to break. Its when you get to gold level tools, thats where I have a problem. Gold tools are very hard to get in this game and so when you find out that they can break it makes you wonder why you didn't just stick to the standard tools in the first place. An easy fix would to either make it so they cant break or add an even better tier of tools that last forever, but are extremely hard to get.
Overall this is an amazing game and is absolutely the best game in the series. Everyone who has a switch should pick up this game and it is also good enough to warrant buying a switch just for ACNH