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Hands-on with Animal Crossing New Horizons’ Party Play mode

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Nintendo Australia have been strong supporters of Supanova and shows like it, for some time, so it was no surprise that they were going to be at the 2020 Melbourne show, but the news that they would be bringing Animal Crossing New Horizons to the show, was met with a lot of joy and they had a dozen or so stations set up, but the catch, the game was only set for Party Play.

If you are not aware of what that means, Party Play is when you play with other people, either on the one Switch, like at the event, or on multiple Switch consoles. What it allows for, is one person to have control over the world, to some extent and others to play around in it, the concept is ok, the execution though is a little odd. The Leader, which can be anyone, can interact with the world in a far greater sense than anyone else, they can initiate conversations with other residents, go in and out of buildings, buy things and even pick up items lying on the ground. The Followers however are limited much more than you might have thought, while you can chop at a tree for wood or fruit, you can’t pick it up. You can’t open up any menu’s, speak with other folks or go into any buildings, the restrictions make sense, as the camera is locked to the Leader, but it is odd when you think that for a game about social interaction, you are literally isolated from talking to anyone or interacting with anything more than shaking a tree.

Of course, the entire point of a party is everyone should have some fun and swapping between Leaders is really simple, just give the controller a shake, no word on what button allows the same, but once its engaged, the other characters on the screen will start waving at the camera, letting you decide who will press A to become the Leader next. The simplistic approach means that even younger gamers will be able to swap around, whenever they want, without the need for menus or over-complicated inputs. Speaking of menus, we also spent a bit of time interacting with them, as only the Leader can craft in the world, which as our goal for the demo was to build a vaulting pole each, that required some finessing of things. Crafting a pole was simple, but it needed five softwood, which you can get free trees, as each player could hack at the tree with their axe, to have wood drop, seeing it was easy, but again only the Leader could collect it, however before we could complete the collecting of the wood, disaster struck and one of our group was attacked by bees.

Now the good news, the attack left them with a swollen eye and nothing else, there are actually no punishments that arise if you decide not to heal right away, so you can ignore it if you choose to. Of course, we didn’t want that, so the group agreed to get our injured villager healed up before we headed to the museum, which is where the menus came into play. In order to for the villager who was hurt to be healed, we needed medicine, which meant hitting up the store run by Timmy and Tommy, but as our guide from Nintendo was the one with all the bells, a quick transfer of cash was required. The obstacle was though, that only the Leader can access a proper inventory, the Followers can merely cycle through their items, so a quick change of Leaders and then dropping some bells on the ground, plus a swap back, we finally got some medicine and were all healed up, but as this was the first time we had been into the new store, we got the rundown of how it worked, including the daily hot item, which as the name suggests changes daily.

Once all members were back up to full health, we started to explore and this was when our guide took us inside and detailed a little bit more about how the designing works. For those that love the manual push and pull of furniture, you can still do that, but they have added two new options, which will make things much easier for you. The recent Direct spotlighted the multi-grab of items on the wall, which is one way of viewing a room, you can cycle through each wall, placing things firmly in the spot you want, something past games have had issues with. The other option is a top-down view, where your character is removed and you get a cursor to control instead, the highlight of this is that you can see the entire space, letting you just layout your goods as you want, and it just works.

Finally, we were taken to the museum, complete with Blathers standing in the entrance hall, though as an owl and it being 10 am in the morning, he was asleep. We had the choice between fish and fossils, and the group went for fish, so we went right and explored the aquarium, though it was pretty bare. What I liked that it was really large, so plenty of space for all the spoils of your fishing to be showcased, but it did highlight something that, whilst outside was there, but wasn’t much of an issue that is the teleporting. As the camera follows the Leader, at all times, if your character is not the Leader and you wander off, or get left behind, you will be teleported back to them, which again, in the open world is very good, however as the characters load in slowly, whenever you go into a new room, by the time my character, who was Player 4, appeared, the Leader was so far ahead, I would also teleport to them, taking the fun out of it.

The final few minutes in my time with the game was just spent exploring with the other players, vaulting over water, digging holes and catching bugs and it was just fun. There was no challenge to beat, no achievement to worry about, just a few minutes of pure fun and that was what I got from Animal Crossing New Horizons overall, fun. Sure there are some concerns over how the game lets only the Leader in Party Play do anything of note, along with transferring items between players, but the fun outweighs any of the issues I had with it.

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About The Author
Luke Henderson
So, I have been gaming since controllers only had two buttons and because I wanted to, I started my own site. Now of course, you can find me writing for Vooks as well

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