Tom Nook’s reign of terror continues
(This
review contains minor spoilers!)
It’s no secret that I adore Animal Crossing. I’ve played nearly every
single game in the franchise released stateside (including the god awful amiibo Festival). Despite this, when it
was announced the series was going to try its hand at playing the mobile
market, I was skeptical. Mobile games have gotten a pretty fair rep recently as
being little more than cash grabs that prioritize waiting over playing. I was
sincerely hoping that Animal Crossing
Pocket Camp would take the high road.
While it’s far from perfect, I think
that Pocket Camp is an entertaining
time-waster that can be played for free to its full enjoyment.
The game is essentially a simplified
variation on the real Animal Crossing experience.
You are put in charge of a small campsite, which you are free to customize and
furnish however you’d like. Your character also has plenty of clothing
customizations available for purchase, as well as a trailer you can decorate
the exterior and interior.
Unlike the core series, Pocket Camp has a main goal you can aim
for: in surrounding areas you can meet animal villagers. Similar to Viva Piñata each villager has a set of
needs you have to meet in order to move them into your campsite. You have to
complete missions for them first off, finding fish, fruit, bugs and various
other things they want to raise their friendship level. Once you’ve done that,
you must prepare your camp with their favourite furniture, which you can order
from an easy-to-use catalogue.
One thing Pocket Camp has loads of is pure charm. Just as with the other
games in the series, the world of the game is delightfully sweet and adorable,
filled with colourful visuals and a friendly, upbeat soundtrack backing it up.
I do wish the villager characters had been given more dialogue, because in my
playtime all I could ever get them to say were thinly veiled tutorials and
instructions on how to do simple tasks you learn about in the first 10 minutes
of playtime.
The graphics are some of the best I’ve
seen on mobile in a long time. Despite being developed in the Unity engine, the
game looks nearly identical to New Leaf on
the 3DS, retaining the distinct look and feel of the franchise without
compromising too much. It looks just plain great.
As to be expected from a mobile game,
this isn’t exactly a game you’re meant to play for hours at a time. Pocket Camp is a game that you check in
once every few hours, fool around for a bit, and then set up some stuff to
check on later on. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world, but there’s
something captivating about it. Just like in the real Animal Crossing games it’s fun to just go catch a fish because a
penguin asked you to, or work at getting a new piece of furniture. The game
world rotates every two hours, bringing new villagers and new missions for you
to go on.
The biggest issue I have with the game
is the main goal. As I said earlier, you need to gather furniture to invite new
villagers to stay in your campsite. The only problem is that very quickly it
becomes a complete grind-fest trying to gather extreme amounts of crafting
materials for each furniture piece. Most villagers need 5 new pieces of
furniture each to move in, and the more expensive materials require constant
running around and completing dozens of missions for villagers over the course
of the 2 hour timeframes. You’ll catch the same types of fish over and over and
over again in hopes that one of the villagers will give you a small amount of
wood to get you further to the goal. Then, once you finally get enough to make
the table this cat needs to move in, you start all over again because you need
even more wood to make the next thing he needs.
Pocket
Camp packs oodles of charm and a lot of good vibes into this mobile
package, and I’d recommend all Animal
Crossing fans give it a look. It’s way
better than amiibo Festival was. Unfortunately
the grinding required to find crafting materials does become a bit overbearing
really fast, as entire days can go by without any progress being made. For a
free game, I’d say it’s worth your time. Just don’t expect to spend too much of
it.
FINAL SCORE
6/10
Okay
No comments:
Post a Comment