At its most basic, it succeeds as an AC game. If you’re looking for something new in the AC franchise this will entertain you without issue if you play sporadically. Spend a good amount of time with it and you will see how careless and thoughtless some of the design decisions are. Crafting seems to have been added as an afterthought because it polled well with focus groups. Building your At its most basic, it succeeds as an AC game. If you’re looking for something new in the AC franchise this will entertain you without issue if you play sporadically. Spend a good amount of time with it and you will see how careless and thoughtless some of the design decisions are. Crafting seems to have been added as an afterthought because it polled well with focus groups. Building your own tools fits the theme of beginning life again on a new island, but after it loses its novelty, its just a VERY basic durability system that doesn’t show any gradual degradation. Your perfect-looking net or axe just vanishes with a poof after enough uses. It tries to encourage a loop of gathering and crafting, but crafting more than one or two things at a time is so tedious I’d often find myself pulling up a different screen to look at. I’m not saying the system doesn’t belong in the game, but the combination of ‘only random’ (still multiple duplicates or recipes from the recipe kits available at the very start of the game) recipe acquisition, clunky crafting UI, and literally no form of progression makes me wonder how much more robust this kind of system could be in 2020.



The biggest killer for me was the villager system. If someone moves out you get a vacant lot in their place. It will randomly fill after some random number of days. This feels like someone else making villager choices for you while you accidentally left your switch unattended. I think this is so you will feel pressured into buying Amiibos to help replace villagers you did not invite to your island. Having them move out on their own can take WEEKS (This system is what made me want to leave this review).



Many of the systems in place to add a sense of a dynamic town begin to feel punishing. Random vendors/NPC visit the island but are limited to one visit per week. Take a day off from playing when the ones making collectibles of the things you caught happen to be visiting? Better luck next week! There are a lot of QoL issues that become infuriating after you spend enough time with the game. So many buttons go unused in menus and elsewhere. Buying items requires you to get them one or five at a time, clicking through multiple screens of unskippable text each time for the privilege. It just seems like they ran out of time making all the items and focusing on visual appeal (It’s great!) and had to sacrifice having a deep look at the big flaws in this iteration. This game will be worth buying when it’s been out for a few major overhauls. They’ll focus on seasonal events and patching out exploits in between DLC releases. My prediction is they will never make any attempt at addressing the ‘minor’ issues outlined here because they don’t break the game, they just make it more frustrating to play. … Expand