REVIEW: ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + 3.0 Update’ Makes Island Living Better Than Ever Before

Animal Crossing New Horizons – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, the recent Nintendo Switch 2 port of the 2020 cozy life sim, is the definitive way to experience island life. The new Switch 2 enhancements, including higher resolution, faster loading, and mouse controls, are genuinely great upgrades that make the experience even better than before.

Paired with the simultaneous launch of update 3.0, bringing some sorely needed updates, erasing a lot of the unnecessary friction, making crafting specifically a much more enjoyable mechanic. While not everything works, namely the 12-player online play, Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition renewed my addiction to a modern cozy classic. 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons initially launched in 2020, ultimately being an escape from reality that was sorely needed. You, a new villager on a deserted island, join the ever-industrious tanuki Tom Nook and a handful of other animals in the uninhabited wild. Your mission is to make the island a new home for many, crafting, fishing, and building along the way to make it truly your own brand of special.

Animal Crossing New Horizons – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition majorly smooths out the experience.

It was a fantastic, cozy experience then, and the Switch 2 updates make it even better. The previous resolutions are bumped, smoothing out a lot of the jagged edges in the original version of the game. Handheld jumps to 1080p from 720p, while docked goes to 4K from 1080p. It was always cute, but it looks crisper and loads much faster.

You no longer need to wait almost a minute to get into the game, with load times more than halved. Pop-in is also greatly reduced. Both graphics and performance are much smoother than before. While 60fps would have been nice, the new enhancements are largely great.

The newly added mouse controls also make decorating easier than ever before. You can pop off the Joy-Cons to switch to them when playing with your interiors. It gives the player a much finer amount of control than messing with the joysticks, erasing a lot of the previous frustration of missed clicks and accidentally selected furniture. You can also use the mouse controls when interacting with the bulletin board, making it easier to draw your dream messages to your island’s inhabitants. 

The 3.0 update enhances basically everything.

There is one glaring exception to the otherwise great enhancements. Multiplayer has been boosted to 12 players at once, up from 8 previously. While, in theory, it’s a fun idea to bring more of your friends together in one space, in practice, it’s genuinely bad. Every time someone flies in, the entire world freezes and waits for the new player to arrive.

If you actually try to get 12 players together, it’s an eternity waiting to finally get folks all in one place, assuming the game doesn’t crash and reset the progress entirely. Nintendo’s online infrastructure desperately needs work, making online play something you actively avoid when it should be a celebration. 

The arrival of update 3.0 just elevates the experience, even on the base Switch. The newly added hotel is a lot of fun, adding new systems to interact with and new stuff to buy, including clothes, furniture, and more. Every day, you can decorate a new room, selecting from a few different themes.

The hotel gives you some furniture and the like that fit the theme, but you can also use your extensive library of items to make the room fit the theme. You can truly make some incredible-looking rooms if you’re talented, but even those of us who are less creatively inspired benefit from the tickets awarded. 

Customize fresh islands however you want in the Slumber Islands.

As guests arrive at the hotel, they also wander your island. If any of those guests are previous inhabitants of your island, they’ll actually remember you, which is a really nice touch. It makes the island feel much more lived in and alive, mixing in a rotating cast of fresh faces rather than the core set of villagers that call your island home.

You can even set outfits for them, aligning them with your island’s theme if you have one. It’s great to have new dailies to focus on in a six-year-old game. For those just jumping in on the Switch 2 version, it just gives you more to do that fits in organically. 

There’s even more in 3.0, including Slumber Islands, where you can customize fresh islands in whatever way you want, mostly for the vibes, but you do need an online subscription for it. Home storage has been expanded, Resetti finally appears to help you more easily reset parts of your island, and there’s a host of new items, some of which are themed around LEGO and other Nintendo properties, like The Legend of Zelda.

The biggest, best updates are to the crafting system.

All of these additions are fantastic, but none more so than the changes made to crafting. You can finally craft with materials directly from your storage, along with crafting multiples of one item at the same time. These changes genuinely make crafting infinitely better than before, removing the unnecessary friction that plagued it previously.

No more going into your storage to pull out materials, to craft one thing, before going back to get more if you decide to continue crafting, having to then go back to craft more, and so on. What used to be an annoyance is now more fun than before, with this single change completely updating a core system in a fantastic way.

Overall, Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Switch 2 Edition is the definitive way to experience island living. The graphical and performance updates are significant, with the boosted performance and reduced load times making the game more beautiful and easier to get back into.

The 3.0 update gives the player more to do and makes the island feel more alive, while streamlining crafting into a better experience than ever before. Whether you’re starting a fresh island on the Switch 2 or hopping back in on your OG Switch, it’s never been a better time to get back into the daily swing of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Switch 2 Edition is available now on the Nintendo Switch 2, with the 3.0 update available on the original Nintendo Switch as well.