I Finally Played 'Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp'

Whenever there's a hot new video game app I'm usually like, "oh, I have a phone made in 1632, so I guess I won't be able to play this enticing phone game that everyone is into," and I move on with my life tending to the flowers in the meadow. But everything's different now and I may finally taste the delights of modern technology. Now, I realise that Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp was released a full year ago, but since I got a new phone pretty recently I have figured out that I can actually try it out. So that's what I finally did this week, and it rules.

Me having a good time with a dog. This is the life.

Just hanging out by this plant.

I wasn't too sure what to expect from a mobile version of Animal Crossing. I was sceptical of how it would play on a phone and thought that maybe it was a blessing in disguise that I couldn't play it. I figured it wouldn't be as relaxing or fun to play on a phone. When I got around to playing it, though, I was pretty pleasantly surprised. I would say it doesn't feel nearly as authentically community and friendship focused as the console editions just because it feels a lot more collect-y and level-up focused, but I wouldn't call that a downside as such. It's a different kind of game, and while it lacks the ambling and building sense of belonging and neighbourliness of other Animal Crossing games, it does bring a more traditionally compelling gameplay style along with ways to craft, collect, complete tasks, and level up exponentially.

My friends all love to hang out next to my coffin.

Welcome to camp!

A lot of the comfort in the Animal Crossing series as a whole comes from the routines present in all the little things you can do, and this is applied really well to Pocket Camp with implementations of timed wait systems that in most mobile games are incredibly annoying. In this game, it makes sense to have wait times for all the things that have wait times (e.g. new requests from animals, item crafting) because there are a surprising amount of things you can do that allow you to play in quite long sittings. I can play this game for far too long. And I will. Because it's fun.

That said, the game does lag sometimes, and ultimately I prefer the complexities of the console titles (as well as the lack of the weird loot box style monetisations that come with a free to play mobile game - I'd always rather buy a good game outright), so I'll be really looking forward to that Animal Crossing title for the Nintendo Switch. That means I've gotta get a Switch, too, but until then, I'm crafting the sweetest camp you can imagine.