There’s no doubt that Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a good game. If it weren’t a good game, it wouldn’t have sold roughly 26 million copies for the Nintendo Switch as of now. The thing is though, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is vastly overrated. It’s fun at first, but it doesn’t have the staying power of other games. It’s repetitive. You do the same thing over and over and over again. Yes, it can be addictive, but it eventually becomes old. There is a reason why so many people I know, myself included, have simply stopped playing the game. While it’s fun, and it’s enjoyable for a time, it’s not an elite game and is not “game of the year” material, as we’ve been lead to believe via awards shows and reviews. It’s a good game, but not great. The one point where the game shines is its multiplayer aspect, but even that is repetitive because of the nature of the game.
There are some things that do make Animal Crossing: New Horizons a good game, and we’re going to be fair here. With a global pandemic going on, people have flocked to Animal Crossing, and for good reason. It is by nature a social game. People can visit others’ islands and gain new items, fruit to plant, and explore a brand new territory. This is very cool. Yet it gets old very fast. You take the items back, you build up your house, you interact with your neighbors, you get into insane debt with Tom Nook, and rinse and repeat. You fish, you dig up fossils; the amount to do is endless. Yet to get the most out of the game, you need to do this every day. It gets exhausting, and quite honestly, boring. I couldn’t keep up, as many others couldn’t. It reached a point where it simply wasn’t fun anymore. I played for roughly two months and now it’s simply sitting there. I bought it because of the pandemic, and I suspect that is one thing that can be attributed to its insane sales.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a good game, and a fun game while it lasts, but it’s still vastly overrated. It doesn’t have the longevity of other games, as while there are various updates and events, it reaches a point where it isn’t enjoyable anymore. It’s too repetitive. Reviewers and game awards have led us to believe this is a masterpiece, but it simply isn’t. It’s a good game, a fad, but that’s it. There’s too much to keep up with and while it’s a solid social experience, there’s no voice chat and even visiting different islands there’s only so much you can do. In fact, you do the same thing every time you visit a new island, and then go back to your own island and plant, add to your house, etc. It’s literally the same thing every time. This is not enjoyable. It gets old very fast. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is an overrated game, despite its 26 million sales, and while Nintendo has done a fantastic job with various updates, events, etc., they cannot change the nature of the game, which is an overly repetitive sandbox game.
It’s great that so many people enjoy it, but at some point, people will veer away from it to other games. That’s simply the reality of Animal Crossing. It’s in its very nature. That’s fine, but, the recognition it’s gotten is a bit misleading.