Can be a neat little cozy game with lots to do, but can also be one of the most inconvenient games out there.

The game looks great, has a lot of content and customisation, being able to build and place stuff outside is a game changer. I've enjoyed (for the most part) designing my island/ house, collecting fossils, bugs and fish, and overall just chilling.

But man does this game LOVE to waste your time, almost everything has an animation, text box pop up, your tools break very quickly, misplacing/ misbuilding things, you'll be time travelling a lot as it seems almost everything takes a day in real time (moving buildings, building stuff and only being able to order 5 items a day) and the absolutley abissmal online, it works but the set up is a nightmare, so many text boxes just to get on the bloody thing, good luck trying to join if someone is using there nook phone, and if the island isn't available or you got the code wrong? you have to go through all the text boxes and reconnect. But thats not even the worst part, the worst part is once you're on the island (if it's a popular island like a treasure island for example) you WILL be stopped every 5 seconds for anywhere between 30 seconds up to 2 minutes all because someone is either leaving the island or joining, in which you HAVE to watch the whole process, every. single. time. I highly doubt they play tested this, who thought this was a good idea?! What were they thinking?!

Something that has turned a lot of people off is that this one doesn't really feel like a life sim, but more of a designer game, that doesn't make it bad, just different compared to the other animal crossing games. What doesn't help are the lifeless npcs, repeating the same dialogue over and over, weirdly having much more personality in the post cards they send you. There's also less shops and attractions than say new leaf, the main things are here, general shop, clothes shop and the museum/cafe, but no clubs, hair dressers, shoe shops or flower shops, granted some of those are still in the game, just not in the form of actual places which gives you less things to put on your island.

In the end whether this is better than new leaf is up to preference, if you enjoy the life sim aspects of the series more, then new leafs the one for you, but if you enjoy the customisation aspect more, then new horizons should be a fun time. I can personally go either way, but overall new horizons is a game I'll put a good chunk of hours into every now and again, only to slowly become annoyed at all the inconveniences and put it down for a while.

My most anticipated Switch game, it came out on my birthday and I had that shit + the Animal Crossing Switch pre-ordered. I definitely got my moneys worth and I had so much fun playing for most of 2020, hundreds of hours. Unfortunately they kinda missed the mark with some things, like crafting, and a huge amount of content missing at launch which has been remedied by now, but adding the content later doesn't really make up for the scuffed launch. In hindsight, the whole thing was just pretty disappointing. It's hard for me to get back into the game nowadays. My best memories about this game are just playing with friends.