Animal Crossing New Horizons Update(s) Impressions
On Wednesday, Animal Crossing fans got a surprise: Nintendo released the free Animal Crossing New Horizons update a day early. And then on Thursday, the Switch 2 edition update was released. We checked out both of these updates and now have some early thoughts on them.
The free Animal Crossing New Horizons update and the Switch 2 edition are both out now. I checked them out and now have some early thoughts on them.
Let’s start with the Switch 2 edition update. There’s less to talk about with it. This edition upgrades the game’s graphics, loading times, adds a megaphone for calling animals, and adds mouse controls for furniture decoration. The best part of this update is the mouse controls. I tested them out and they worked really well. Decorating was even more fun with these controls. The rest of the update however…well…its alright.
The Switch 2 graphics for New Horizons do not look too much different. In fact you really don’t notice any difference until you go into buildings. The characters, especially the player character, look nicer and more detailed. The animals and items in doors look a little better too. I couldn’t really tell much difference over all though. The same could be said for the loading times. This game loading pretty fast on Switch 2 anyway.
As for the megaphone, it works just as well as the one on the 3DS did. Basically it messes up all the time. Sometimes it’ll catch what you say but most of the time some other animal will answer or nobody will answer at all. I don’t think this will be very useful. The free update that Nintendo gave all players was much better than the Switch 2 edition update.
With the free update, Nintendo added so much more than what Switch 2 owners had to pay for. The free update added tons of new items, four new animals via amiibo support, a Hotel, the new slumber island creation mode, and other little tweaks like bulk item creation.
The best part of the free update is the slumber island creation mode. The only catch is that you must be online to take part in this mode. By going to sleep in your house, you can enter this new mode and create three new islands to play around in. And you don’t have to create these islands online. You can create dream islands with friends!
Some friends and I tested out the slumber creation and we had a blast. One of my friends is really great at land design and had already created a cool island. So the other friend and I decorated what was already there. You get access to whatever items your friend has and all of their animals and your animals. This mode was amazing. We had so much fun. I can’t wait to test it out more on my own too.
The new hotel is neat too. You can decorate hotel rooms, two a day and earn Hotel tickets You can also get tickets from creating DIY items for a shipping container outside of the hotel. There is also a neat little store inside of the hotel where you can use your tickets to buy new items. I had fun creating rooms and even tried the Switch 2’s mouse to do it and that was so cool. Creating items for shipping was easy too thanks to bulk creation!
The new items I’ve seen so far have been amazing. The Zelda and Splatoon items, which you get from amiibo support, are jaw dropping. And there is some neat new items that can be bought from the hotel. It seems like more items will be unlocked over time.
Animal Crossing New Horizon’s free update is incredible. The Switch 2 update could be a little bit better but for people who already have the game, it wasn’t that expensive to update to the new edition. The most interesting part about these updates is that Nintendo hasn’t said these are the final updates. It seems likely that we’ll see more free (and paid?) updates coming to the game in the future.
What do you think of the updates to Animal Crossing New Horizons?
Article By Daniel Fugate
