[Impressions] Animal Crossing Pocket Camp

Hey everyone, it's time for me to post more Impressions! On top of it, this time it's for a smartphone game. However, please keep in mind this is a one-off, I just decided to write this post because it's a Nintendo game.

Moving back to the topic at hand, these are my Impressions for Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, available on iOS and Android, free to download, with in-app purchases a.k.a. it's another mobile game with its own premium currency. However, Nintendo offers you a great game with no need for you to spend any money on it. But let's leave that for later in the post.

As the name implies, this game revolves around Camps, specifically around you building your own forest camp. The core of the gameplay revolves around developing your camp while at the same time inviting other characters to join it. Before doing this though, you'll be collecting fruit, catching bugs and fishing in order to acquire items. These will then allow you to fulfill requests from the other characters and, in turn, deepen your friendship with them. When you reach a certain level of friendship with a character, you will then have the option to invite it to your camp, but only after you've crafted the required items. Oh yes, to obtain new items you will have to craft them using resources earned either from completing those mentioned requests or as a reward from the log-in bonuses or by completing in-game achievements. Each time you level up a friendship, you receive some "experience points". Collect enough and, as you can guess, you yourself will level up. Leveling up in this game awards you some free and premium currencies, along with unlocking a new character for you to interact with, as well as a couple of new items to craft.

Before tackling the currencies, I'd just like to say that there's an aforementioned achievements system in-game that rewards you with precious resources throughout your gameplay, but most importantly, with generous amounts of premium currency. However, as one can imagine, the more you play the game the less challenges you'll have to complete and the harder the remaining ones will be. There's a long list of achievements to complete, but there's also daily challenges, which are much more simpler, such as "collect three pears", and reward you with small amounts of resources.

Now, let's move on to the premium currency, touted as Leaf Tickets. As in other games of the genre, you can use this currency to speed up crafting times and cover the lack of necessary resources to do so. Beyond this, you can also use it to expand your inventory space or buy cosmetic items. These are very expensive items that can only be bought using Leaf Tickets (at the time of release, there are only two items, each costing 250 Tickets). From what is available in the game, these premium decorations both come with an exclusive character, but there's no friendship associated with them. You can only talk to them and they'll spew a couple of lines. So far, these premium decorations are just that, a symbol of status if you will, saying you either bought them using real money or using your hard-earned Leaf Tickets without spending a single cent. In sum, if you don't want to spend money in this game it's going to be one of those situations where you'll be able to get one of these items after a long period of time of stacking up Tickets. And of course, that's perfectly fine and what I'll be doing.

One thing this game does very well is not being predatory about its paid side of things, it really is a case of "you can do this and take a couple of days to do so but if you pay a small amount you'll have it done in five minutes". But the thing is, the game is built in a way that it's not really worth it to spend real money on it. After you play this game for a short while you immediately understand that even if you had tons and tons of Leaf Tickets you wouldn't really benefit that much. Pocket Camp is one of those games that you log-in once a day for 15 to 20 minutes to collect your items and fulfill some requests and you're pretty much done. Yes, if you use Tickets you can craft items instantaneously and without needing resources, but would it really be worth it? By playing this game for the last 4 days I've enjoyed my time with it and think I will continue to enjoy it. Even if the rate at which I'm rewarded dwindles, just collecting fruit to fulfill character X's request already is good enough for me, there's no need to rush the pace at which I'm doing it.

Before wrapping this up, I also want to mention that there's a social aspect to the game: in every location in the map you go to you'll find characters from other players. Then, by talking to them you can send that player a friend request, visit its own camp or even buy resources that player has put up for sale.

All in all, this game is a great way to waste some time and the time you'll spend with it is probably going to be a good one. It's great that Nintendo has made such a tame game when it comes to microtransactions, I guess it's Nintendo being Nintendo once again (and let's all be thankful for that). If anything, this game is great marketing for the Animal Crossing series and will definitely attract new players for the already existing games on consoles but, above all, renew players thirst for a full-fledged Animal Crossing game on their Nintendo Switch.

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