laughably bad.

i didn't need to hear it from kojima to know he made this purely for borderline threats for more fanservice.

the mgs original trilogy is just that. this is a weird add-on that gets unfortunately tagged along with it. it's literally the exact same situation as apollo justice.

Well, it controls better than the previous entries... Unfortunately that doesn't make the gameplay very interesting. The section where you sneak through an active warzone sound interesting in theory, but in practice it just feels messy as the battle doesn't progress until you move, which makes the whole thing feel very inorganic. The octocamo somewhat fixes MGS3's camouflage issue of encouraging changing camo all the time from a menu, by automatically switching to a perfect camo when you stop moving. Not having to open up a menu is nice, but being able to use a perfect camo pretty much constantly is ridiculously strong and ends up taking away from the stealth gameplay.

The story is like fan fiction trying to bring back everything from the previous games, and considering the ludicrous amount of cutscenes it's shocking how slowly it moves. It wasn't until the end of Act 3 that something actually interesting happened, and the rest of the game never lived up to that. Most of the game relied on nostalgia and tried to create build on that rather than actually doing something original.

Also the constant framerate issues and poor audio balancing in cutscenes should not go unmentioned.

I despise this game with all my heart. Never have I seen game design this morally corrupt, this worthless in creating fun interactions for the player. The entire game is one huge, joyless grind, designed to make playing it a habit, to make booting it up every three hours an addiction. It features three different subscription models, on top of lootboxes, on top of the metric ton of microtransactions. But I think ‘micro’ is the wrong word here, so let me phrase it another way: 'Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp' hides an excessive amount of content behind paywalls. What isn’t hidden is the daily grind to make you, the player, addicted. What is hidden is the fun cosmetics and furniture – The possibility of customizing your clothing, your campsite in a fun way. But doing that is expensive. Playing Pocket Camp is expensive in general, it feeds on your time and produces emptiness, with the promise of less emptiness if you just buy into it. If you just buy into it, it honors you, tells you you did amazing – ‘Welcome to the Pocket Camp Club’ it says jubilantly – and creates, as a reward, more emptiness for you to enjoy.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is what happens when rip out the joyous heart of a beloved series and replace it with greed. Instead of giving something to the player, this game just takes. And keeps on taking. It took a lot of money from me. It took a lot of my time. And, in the end, I filled the emptiness it gave me with disgust. For all the abusive gameplay loops. For the morally bankrupt monetization. Please, do not play this game. And if you currently are, I beg of you, step away. Remember the sunk cost fallacy. You are worth way more than what his game considers you to be.