'Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp' Review Roundup
"Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp" is not the first time Nintendo has made a portable version of the "Animal Crossing" series. The shift to mobile phones, fetch timers and microtransactions may have soured a segment of "Animal Crossing" fans on the new title, though it has not stopped players from downloading the game.
On the surface, "Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp" looks and plays much like other beloved "Animal Crossing" titles, and fans were quick to embrace the new version. In just six days since it's been up on Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store, "Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp" has already recorded more than 15 million downloads, according to SensorTower.
The game is free to download, which helps that number significantly. "Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp," however, has in-game purchases in it in the form of "Leaf Tickets" that can be spent on furniture and speeding certain tasks.
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It's this monetization strategy that threatens to rob "Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp" of its charms, as reviewed by Eurogamer. For one thing, almost everything has been given a visible timer, perhaps by design to urge players to buy Leaf Tickets to speed things up.
Players also need to be careful spending their Leaf Tickets, too, since a few items in the game can only be unlocked by spending them. It's one of the few things supermodel Chrissy Teigen touched on in her series of Tweets reviewing the game.
According to her, "pocket animal crossing might be okay for you AC newbies but for us tom nook loyalists it is merely a hit of the crack that is actual, real, animal crossing," as she noted on Sunday, Nov. 26.
"It lacks the heart. The soul. It's a sandwich with no meat. A car without tires," she explained via Twitter.
"Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp" is currently rated at 76 on MetaCritic, with users giving it an average score of 7.2 to reflect "Mixed or average reviews."
