Animal Crossing: City Folk Review

The city is the big new addition, but it's lacking in new features.

The new city environment might be a relief to anyone who has started to feel a little enclosed (with the secret island from the GameCube game being our only memory of a place outside of the main town), but it's not nearly as big a selling point as the game's title suggests. For one, the city isn't very big, and secondly it's half populated by stores that were in the DS game - albeit permanently instead of the travelling salesmen that they were before. Yes, you can get a makeover here to look like your Mii, which has great novelty value, and catch a show at the theatre, but for one of the game's defining new features the city feels, quite strangely for Nintendo, half-arsed.

Equally underwhelming are the new online features, which have been spearheaded by the revolutionary chat functionality. Voice chat in online gaming might be relatively new to Nintendo gamers, but it's been commonplace in PC and console gaming since the turn of the century. The Wii Speak peripheral works well, allowing a whole group of gamers to be heard if they're all in the same room, with a maximum of four consoles able to be linked in a chat, but it's more a nice addition rather than a ground breaking new feature. The way you're now able to mingle with friends online, sharing messages, get new neighbours who have moved from your friends' towns and generally hang out is nice too, but it still feels like baby steps considering the online functionality other games are offering.

Due to the game's real-time clock and seasons, Animal Crossing is designed to be played in fairly short bursts, but every day. For example, some insects needed for the museum only come out at a certain time and during a certain season, and the useful (but limited to friends) auction house is only open at certain times. You'll often get asked for things that aren't possible to get until weeks later, meaning you'll need to invest an awful lot of real world time into the game in order to see all it has to offer. This is what made it such a perfect fit on the DS, a platform that is made to be played in short bursts wherever you might be.

Something else that hasn't changed much is the presentation. We know Animal Crossing has a deliberately twee style, but some refinements other than widescreen support would have been appreciated. We're pretty sure it would have been possible to add more detail to the town and characters, yet retain the style of the original games, but Nintendo seemed content to give us a game that resembles its DS relative far too closely. There are some really nice touches here though, like the way the grass is worn away if you always walk a certain route, and how plots that used to be homes slowly return to normal grass over time. Simple stuff maybe, but it adds character to your town and shows that Nintendo thought about the little details.

Your house starts off considerably smaller than this

Audio is rather retro, with plenty of beeps and bops, and characters that talk in a language that will likely irritate anyone adverse to anything obscenely twee. The best part about the characters is their conversations with you, which are often quite amusing - even your own comments after catching fish can bring a smile to your face thanks to their extreme randomness. Something of a disappointment is the lack of NES games (a great addition to the GameCube version), but considering Nintendo now charges for these on the Virtual Console, it's no real surprise.

It's hard to be down on a game that, when judged on its own merits, is great fun and addictive, but it's equally hard to look past the fact that this is essentially the same game we've been playing since it belatedly arrived on the GameCube. After the DS game it's also odd to be forced to play in front of a TV screen again, with the hop in and out nature of the gameplay just feeling better suited to a handheld. Still, newcomers will find this a lot of fun, while veterans are likely to find it hard to resist once again crossing with animals in their town.