Multiplayer Activities
The general gameplay loop in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the same as it’s always been in the series. You take out a loan, go fishing, bug-catching, and fossil hunting, and sell what you find to pay off your loan. That’s a very simplified loop. It doesn’t sound fun, but it 100% is.
Hopping online in any game tends to breathe new life into it. Taking part in activities with friends is always better than doing it solo… except for in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Not only does the game once again highlight the Nintendo Switch’s abysmal online service (including the smartphone companion app), with two friends unable to head to your island at the same time due to “connection interference,” but once you do all get together… there’s nothing to do.
You can go fishing and catch bugs, you can maybe even dig up any fossils you spot if the island’s owner doesn’t mind. Outside of that, though, you’re left to come up with your own fun.
While we’ve broken down a handful of fun multiplayer activities you can do with a group of you, we’d like to have seen Nintendo put a little more thought into how the online worked and what friends would do together.
As is always the case, Nintendo could give the online a bit of an overhaul with a post-launch update, but nothing’s been confirmed as of yet.
Gyroids
This one hurt. The absence of Gyroids in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is blasphemy I tells ye! These weird, stumpy, noise-making, funky-dancing pieces of furniture were yet another item players could collect in previous games.
Do they have a use outside of doing a little jig on the spot and making a noise? Not really, but few things feel so typically Animal Crossing as a good Gyroid, and their absence has been noticed by fans.
While there is apparently some promise that Gyroids will be coming (according to dataminers) in a future update, again there’s not been any confirmation. Considering the huge amount that were in previous titles, it’d be nice to see them return so we can amass our enormous choir in the basement once more.
More Interesting Villager Conversations
As you go about fishing, catching bugs, and digging up fossils, you’ll see your fellow island inhabitants plodding around the island. They’ll be going about their own daily routine, which more often than not just involves walking around… maybe sometimes even with a tool out.
Outside the occasional time they’ve got something they want to talk to you about, the conversations you can have with your villagers are all of about two sentences long.
And honestly, what they’re saying isn’t all that interesting either. I get it, the villagers have to be kid-friendly but that doesn’t mean that more conversations could have been added to stop them from growing stale.
After speaking to my villagers once or twice in a day, I seldom see a reason to go and speak to them again.
It would have been even better if villagers gave you things to do with them. Little quests, so to speak, that would improve your relationship with them and reward you with fruit, Bells, or furniture.
Something, anything, that made the villagers feel like an evolution of their past iterations from previous games would have be welcome. Instead, as cute and charming as they’ll always be, they lack the depth the rest of the game has benefited from.
Even More Bugs, Fish & Fossils
Bugs, fish, and fossils are your financial bread and butter in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but Blathers, the museum curator will need your help to fill the various exhibits.
There are 80 different Bugs and Fish respectively, and a respectable number of fossils to boot. However, considering these are the bulk of the gameplay, and the Switch brings a significant bump in horsepower over the 3DS, we’d have expected to see even more of… well… everything.
No player is going to complain about having even more fish, bugs, and fossils to find, and it’d help add some longevity to the game. Here’s hoping post-launch updates can give us even more critters to catch.
Brewster & Crazy Redd
We get it, the times change and some old, iconic characters from the series have had to hang up their hats. Tortimer hasn’t made it to the island while Joan’s passed her Turnip business down to Daisy Mae. Even the lovely Kapp’n is no longer ferrying us about by road or sea.
But there are two omissions in Animal Crossing: New Horizons that seem to be a little odd. Brewster the old cafe owner in the basement of the museum isn’t around to give us a hot cup of Joe on the daily. He didn’t add a lot in terms of gameplay value, but he was another islander you could befriend. Plus, his cafe made the perfect venue for the one and only K.K. Slider.
Crazy Redd, on the other hand, was a bit of a wheeler dealer type who’d occasionally come to town in his tent and sell a variety of paintings. Some were real, some were fake, and it was down to players to deduce which were which and then donate the real deal to Blathers at the museum.
Again, Redd doesn’t appear to have made the cut for the launch of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, so we can only hope that he comes at a later date. We’re not holding our breath, though, as it’d require a considerable overhaul to the museum interior, too.
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