Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Review - Tom Nook has discovered microtransactions

Animal Crossing should be the ultimate smartphone game. The endless collection and airy character is ideal for a few minutes of playing in the train or on the toilet. The announcement of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp therefore seemed good news. The truth is slightly different.

The original Animal Crossing games are unique. The villages you manage are full of rich characters, who have something new to tell you almost every day. The comical visual style and the matching soundtrack can even relax the most stressed person within half an hour. And the games also know how to serve goals perfectly, without ever having the feeling that you have to reach the finish line as quickly as possible.

A lot of these elements can also be found in Pocket Camp. You have another village to explore, where you can hunt for all kinds of collectibles. And the characters all have the same charms that we know from previous games, which makes it fun to keep talking with them.

The relaxed feeling of aimlessness is lacking in this new game. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is a pure freemium game, and it is clear that Nintendo wants to get the most out of it. While playing, Pocket Camp continuously serves goals, such as collecting a certain amount of fruit or picking up objects for a fellow villager. Goals that in many cases are a lot easier if you put a few euros in the game.

Pay

Components that played in the background in previous Animal Crossing games are lifted to the foreground in Pocket Camp. Take relationships with fellow villagers: you build them up by completing missions and filling a heart-shaped bar. In previous games it was never visible how good your friendship was, so that you could only extract the value of your bond with a virtual animal from the dialogue. In other words: Pocket Camp exchanges the village feeling for cold efficiency.

The urge to have you pay returns in the smallest ways. The shovel, ax and other tools, for example, all fail after a number of uses, so you are forced to keep buying them. Are you trying to make new furniture? Then you have to wait until they are ready, unless you are willing to invest a few Leaf Tickets. You can of course buy these with your real, hard-earned euros.

These are parts that we also know from other freemium games for smartphones and in many of these games even forgiven. Fire Emblem Heroes had a strong emphasis on heroes that you could buy through a random lottery system, but behind that school another fun, largely free, game.

In Animal Crossing, however, all gameplay seems to have been designed to tempt you to press the buy button. The underlying tasks - often imposed by a mission-oriented structure - do not really feel like exploring a nice village. Actually you are just grinding, simply by tapping through the game.

Glamping

With your hard-earned money and collected objects you can make furniture for the home, but a home like in earlier Animal Crossing games does not exist here. Instead, you are parked in a corner with your camper on a campsite (or, yes, a 'glamping' ). Somewhere this is a smart development: you do not have to worry about paying off your mortgage and you have a lot of space right away. At the same time, the homely feeling of previous Animal Crossing games is lacking, in which you really had your own place. Your campsite is continuously visited by other residents, making him feel somewhat impersonal.

That is unfortunate, because a mobile Animal Crossing should be able to work. Co-developer DeNA has, however, put the earnings model first and has built a grindy game around it. Some mobile games can be forgiven, but at Pocket Camp the soul of Animal Crossing is unfortunately lost.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is now available for Android and iOS.

Conclusion

This is not the relaxed, aimless Animal Crossing that you know about the Nintendo 3DS. In this mobile game, an earnings model is central, and you are mainly concerned with constantly chasing set goals.

➕ Breathes the atmosphere of the previous games

➖ Profit model more important than gameplay, lots of grinding

Thanks for reading.

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