Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Mini Review

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is a smartphone game released by Nintendo. Initially I was rather excited for this game. After playing it for a few hours, I was disappointed by how monotonous the game was.

The game has you running around doing requests for random animals. Once you fulfill enough of those requests, you can invite them to live on your campground. Once an animal lives on your campground, you can start the cycle over with a different animal.

If you want to decorate your campground, you can. You can place furniture items in your campground, which can improve your friendship status for some animals, but this only applies to a few furniture items. You can also decorate your RV, but space is very limited.

You can also decorate yourself, which is just a weird way to say you can buy clothing. Clothing is a simple mechanic and there's not really anything else to explain involving it. Some of it looks nice and most of it doesn't.

Musically I was, surprise surprise, disappointed. The music lacks the charm that every other Animal Crossing game has. The songs don't change hourly, K.K. doesn't come to perform on Saturday nights, there's really not much atmosphere to the soundtrack at all.

Graphically the game is a mixture of nice and cheap. The game looks crisp, but the shading just feels off, probably because the models and textures resemble New Leaf, Happy Home Designer, and amiibo Festival, but the lighting resembles Wild World and City Folk. This is most likely an issue with reusing New Leaf assets, but not using the same engine, meaning the lighting would need to be completely configured from scratch to resemble the New Leaf lighting, and doing that would take a lot of time. Also the simple lighting probably runs better on cheaper hardware.

Speaking of the game's performance, this game runs pretty well. I tested the game on a few cheap Android phones and the iPhone SE, and it runs at a perfectly playable framerate on both. I'm honestly quite impressed after Super Mario Run had some stuttering issues on every phone I tried.

The gameplay is about as tolerable as Wild World with the stylus... if the stylus was as big as your finger and your character didn't move very well. Gameplay here is simple and slow, which is good considering, you know, Animal Crossing. The most difficult task gameplay wise is catching bugs, which is just a matter of tapping on the screen when the game tells you to. Yes it's a quick time event, but I don't think they had many options on how to translate this feature to smartphones.

Honestly, Pocket Camp isn't a bad game. I'm disappointed with it because every other Nintendo smartphone game offered a somewhat new experience compared to their console or handheld counterparts. Pocket Camp is more Animal Crossing lite than it is a new Animal Crossing experience. I would love to see a major update that adds better music and changes the lighting, but I suspect we'll have to wait for Animal Crossing Switch for that to happen.