Hokko Life

Hokko Life is a brand new life sim that’s coming to the Nintendo Switch tomorrow. Will fans of Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon want to check this game out? Here is our review of Hokko Life for the Nintendo Switch!

Gameplay

At the start of Hokko Life, you create a character and move into a small town with animals. Hokko Life is a combination of Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. Time/seasons move quickly like Harvest Moon, but doing favors for the animals, crafting stuff, and decorating your house/town are straight out of Animal Crossing.

Hokko Life features more places to go though than Animal Crossing: you can go to a small town center, a city, a mine, and more. Just like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon, fishing is available and its pretty good. Its not as simple as Animal Crossing but if you enjoy fishing in games, then you’ll enjoy this. Mining and catching bugs is fun too.

The most unique part of Hokko Life is its user generated content though. Your town features a workshop. In the workshop, you can craft basic different items to place in your town, put in your house, or share with the animals (items can be bought too at the local store). And you also can create items from scratch!

The creation of items from scratch isn’t easy though. The interface provided will give you some help with specific outlines for chairs or other items if you want, but even with those, putting pieces together can be tricky. The controls for creation are complicated and even using the touch screen to piece items together isn’t perfect. There will be people who get the hang of this creator and create some amazing things. The PC Hokko Life players have already done it!

If you go to the city in Hokko Life, you’ll find a building where you can check other players creations. Unfortunately, you must have creator codes for this building and you can only find those online. Its too bad these creations are not more easily accessible. However, there is another building in the city where you can see the latest items creators made for challenges! You can even go visit the creator’s other creations in the creation building, though theres no quick way to go back to the challenge room. Despite some control issues with creation and issues with user creation sharing, Hokko Life is fun for the most part.

When you’re fishing, bug hunting, mining, or just doing crafting items, there is a lot of fun to be found in this game. Though you have to find that fun yourself. Like Animal Crossing, Hokko Life doesn’t lead you by the hand after it gets started. You can do whatever you want with each day.

It feels like Hokko Life should have either went with a more relaxing real time clock or provided more of a structure for what you should do with your days. The game has a bit of a confused identity but if you love sim games, then you’ll likely want to check this game out. That said, you should be prepared for its graphical issues.

Graphics and Sound

Hokko Life’s graphics are good but they could be so much better. The main character and the animals are pretty cute! And all of the environments look nice but occasional and very noticeable framerate drops and walking right through rocks and other objects (and seeing animals do the same) can take you out of the experience. Hopefully a future update will improve the game’s framerates and item collision detection.

As for the music in Hokko Life, its ok, but nothing really stands out.

Overall, Hokko Life is a good game but some problems hold it back from being the great game it could be.

Conclusion

Hokko Life has a lot of potential. Its user generated content, especially, is pretty neat. Its going to be interesting to see what Switch players add to the already amazing things that PC users have created. A lot of the gameplay in Hokko Life is good too.

That said, the game does suffer from a confused identity. Hokko Life is not sure if it wants to be an Animal Crossing like game or a Harvest Moon game. There is fun to be had with Hokko Life and perhaps updates will smooth out its roughest edges, its graphical issues, but we only recommend that “hardcore” sim fans check this out. Hokko Life may or may not appeal to more casual sim genre fans.

Here’s hoping that we’ll be able to revisit Hokko Life in the future and updates will have improved its graphics and added even more to its already interesting gameplay. Perhaps we’ll be able to give it a better score then. For now, Hokko Life is a good game that might be great with a little more work.

Hokko Life gets a 7.5 out of 10.

A digital code was provided for this review. Hokko Life will be available on the Nintendo Switch eshop on September 27^th, 2022.