Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer Reviews
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is a very enjoyable game until you realize that nothing you do really has any lasting effect on the game or its citizens.
"Get creative and you might enjoy it."
Review in Finnish | Read full review
A mini-game at a maxi-price
Feels like it would benefit from a longer plot, but still fun if you overlook the repetitive nature.
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer will appeal those love decorating homes and collecting Nintendo's new amiibo cards, but for the rest of us, it's a broken home.
Despite revamped controls and a cheerful aesthetic, Happy Home Designer still feels like a dead-end job.
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is a fun twist on the original Animal Crossing games.
Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer looks and sounds like the game that fans were expecting; unfortunately it lacks the depth and addictiveness to keep you interested. Even with its cast of adorable characters and excellent soundtrack, the gameplay becomes stale really fast and you'll find yourself grasping at what little the game has to offer in order to find something to hold your attention.
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer isn't going to dethrone Animal Crossing: New Leaf as the number one game in your 3DS' play log – not by a long shot. In taking away the scant few of the franchise's stressors, however, it becomes a profoundly therapeutic life simulator that respects and rewards every millilitre of creative juice you pour into it. It's a stop-gap on the road to Wii U/NX but a detour that won't soon be surpassed.
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is a brand new take on the series that manages to make moving furniture fun, but fails to innovate in a meaningful way.
On the whole, it's fair to say that most spin-offs are doomed to live in the shadow of their more popular source materials. Even so, Happy Home Designer did have the potential to stand on its own two legs - the sole ingredient needed to confirm that fact being the element of fun, which it sadly lacks. Everything is polished to a very typical high-gloss, Nintendo-brand sheen, but without any deep or meaningful gameplay system in place to bolster the charm, Happy Home Designer ends up feeling disappointingly shallow, with minimal longevity. Perhaps as an eShop game the effect would have been softened - at best, there are a few hours of enjoyment to be had, but the finished package lends little to the justification of a standalone release.
It's a fun little distraction that doesn't require too much attention to enjoy.
My coworkers were little help. Lottie, who started every single day telling me to do my best, became my personal kitten poster. Hang in there! Another had set up an Amiibo phone, to call Amiibos, you see. What if you want to call anyone else? Too bad, he said. This is an Amiibo phone. I used the Amiibo phone once, using an included Amiibo card. The client, a pink otter named Pascal, told me to design him a house, and gave me no criteria. What little structure the game had somehow became even less so.
As a whole Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is pretty good. It is a solid package that uses everything that the 3DS has to offer and it's has loads of entertainment value for those that like to create…
Happy Home Designer is a fun way to pass the time. Certainly not a revolutionary game, and certainly not a perfect game, but it's an interesting take on the Animal Crossing series – having zoomed in so closely on just one aspect of the series is a breath of fresh air.
Happy Home Designer may not be your typical video game, but that's precisely what Nintendo was aiming for. It's not about challenge or winning or competition, but rather about playing interior designer to a host of creatures. While it's mostly very good at what it does, the specifics of what it does won't appeal to most gamers, or even most Animal Crossing fans. Taken on its own terms, however, the only area in which Happy Home Designer falls short of its rather relaxed mission statement is in its social and sharing features, which feel rather anemic.
Given Animal Crossing's sickeningly cutesy look and feel, it's tempting to play tricks on it, to fool its adorably simple-minded denizens into living in squalor and liking it. But the game is just too sincere to prank, the way that toys can't feel embarrassed of how they're played with.
Nintendo's domestic design sim is as cute as you'd expect, but although the lights are on, there's nobody home
A stripped down Animal Crossing with a premise so lightweight it can barely be said to exist at all, and yet there's still an undemanding charm to its no-octane thrills.
Nintendo's new social simulator for 3DS teaches Post Arcade's junior reviewer a couple of things about herself