Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete review – reassuringly expensive-Nick Gillett-Entertainment – Metro

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete – single payment gaming (Nintendo)

The mobile version of Animal Crossing has transformed from a free-to-play game to a paid-for one and it’s all the better for it.

Animal Crossing is a genuinely fascinating franchise. Rather than competing against other players or perpetrating acts of choreographed violence, its twin focuses have always been friendship and home decoration, with side orders of exploration and collecting. With no particular goal, score or end point, its whimsical and open-ended game world is far more enthralling than it might initially sound.

Although it’s been around since the N64 era, the series really hit its stride with 2020’s New Horizons, which had the luck of coming out just as lockdown began and everyone was suddenly unable to do the things in real life that the franchise has always been about. That propelled it into Nintendo’s A-list, which mobile spin-off Pocket Camp also tried to take advantage of.

Originally released in 2017, Pocket Camp was initially free-to-play and, of course, filled with microtransactions. It was a simplified version of the console games, based solely around a campsite, and while the additional content, added over the years of its operation, added up to a lot of unique features the exploitative monetisation never went away… until now.

Pocket Camp’s abridged Animal Crossing experience looks similar to New Leaf on the 3DS but brings a more mobile-orientated approach. You still chat to friendly, anthropomorphised animals, bringing them presents and receiving others in return – while acquiring items to decorate your home – but this time your home is a tent, and the items needed to decorate it come from loot boxes rather than direct purchases.

As a Nintendo game, its gacha mechanics naturally come dressed in a more palatable disguise, in this case fortune cookies, which along with your fortune include random items of furniture, rugs, cuddly toys, and decorations for your campsite home. The fact that there are a staggering 16 fortune cookie vendors on the island tells you all you need to know about their centrality to the game’s revenue model.

Well, thank goodness that tawdry era is over. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete is Nintendo’s antidote, a fully paid-for, microtransaction-free replacement. You’re still helping visiting animals enjoy their time at your campsite, while steadily decorating your tent – along with its peculiar outdoor living space – and pimping your camper van at OK Motors, but now your interactions aren’t fixated on encouraging you to spend money.

The old game’s paid currency, Leaf Tickets, have become Leaf Tokens, which you either get free as a reward for completing activities or buy using in-game currency. They let you speed up wait timers, purchase fortune cookies to get new items, and generally grease the wheels of progress. That’s important because even after its update, you can still often see the remains of the old monetised version poking through.

Despite some dumbing down for mobile there are still loads of things to do. The animals that visit and stay at your campground all want to chat and have various wishes for you to fulfil. There’s also fishing and insect collecting – two absolute staples of the franchise – and while there’s no museum here, to which you can present your collected specimens, you’re still rewarded for finding them.

There are also new things in Complete that weren’t available in the free-to-play version. There’s Whistle Pass, where you can listen to KK Slider gigs if you turn up at the scheduled time. While Human friends can join you after you’ve exchanged Camper Cards by scanning each other’s QR codes.

The Whistle Pass area is brand new (Nintendo)

You can also now appoint a fellow resident as camp caretaker, helping to administer your camp even while you’re not there, by filling fellow animals’ requests and harvesting the crafting materials they offer in return. The only downside is that your friendship levels with them won’t increase, but to make up for it your caretaker will even go fishing and collect insects on your behalf.

Complete will also let you import customised designs from New Horizons, vastly expanding the possibilities both for dressing up and home decor. At the time of writing not quite everything seemed to import perfectly but given the game’s already compendious catalogue of decorations and furniture, it’s still a large dollop of icing on an already substantial cake.

It’s also refreshing to play Nintendo games, with their freedom from bugs (other than the ones you and your caretaker collect) and extraordinary levels of polish, as a mobile game. Even downloading the game’s asset files, when you first open it, comes with its own mini-game that also earns you bells – Animal Crossing’s traditional currency.

It feels as though every detail has been thought through, with a positive player experience in mind, and that includes the ability to import your previous Pocket Camp game save, if you played the original version.

It can’t be overstated how freeing it is not to feel as though you’re continually being shaken down for cash, the game no longer looking for angles to fleece you, but simply letting you enjoy building the best campground you can. It brings it back to the generosity and innocence characterised by the rest of the series, and even though it’s still nowhere near as complex or involving as New Horizons, it’s at least now the simplified mobile version it should always have been.

Formats: iOS (reviewed) and Android
Price: £8.99 (rising to £19.99 after 31st January 2025)
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EPD and Nintendo Cube
Release Date: 2nd December 2024
Age Rating: 3

A lot of furniture has built up over the years (Nintendo)

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