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Animal Crossing: Wild World Review - DS

As we explained in our preview, Animal Crossing lets you live a virtual life in a village made up of friendly creatures. You are free to decorate your house, catch bugs and fish, plant trees and flowers, buy and sell turnips on the 'stalk' market, and more. The only real aim of the game is to pay off your house mortgage, at which point you can gradually expand your tiny apartment into a stylish, hip mansion.

Gameplay

To me, Animal Crossing: Wild World is a game full of contradictions. It improves on many of the faults of the first game, but in some respects falls flat because it sticks to close to the original formula. If you spent six months in the Gamecube version, I'll bet that you only spend half that playing through what is essentially the same game.

The new additions to your toolkit (which already included an axe, shovel, fishing rod and bug net) are a slingshot, stopwatch and maybe a watering can – I can't seem to recall if it was in the console version or not. The slingshot only fires straight up, and can be used to pop balloons holding presents that float through town, and to annoy the pelican postman. The stopwatch is really a timer – it counts down, not up. It also counts the number of fish and bugs caught in that time. Finally, the watering can is used to keep all your pretty flowers alive.

When it comes down to it, none of these new tools add to the longevity of the title. Balloons float by rarely, and act as a momentary distraction, while the stopwatch is only really useful when playing multiplayer. The watering can could (for all I can remember) even be in the first one, and it's surprisingly finicky to get it to actually sprinkle on the plant you want and not the surrounding ground. I would have thought a simple automatic lock-on system could be easily implemented, which would make all the watering much easier, and less of a chore (even though, strictly speaking, it is one).

In the town, now your house can be situated anywhere, rather than in a particular block. This location, as well as other aspects of your character, is cleverly worked out in the taxi ride to your new village when you begin. Your town still contains Nook's, a store that grows into a fully-fledged supermarket as you buy items. The Able Sisters return with their clothing store, as does Blathers and the museum. A nice addition to the museum is the ability to check what your fossils are right there, rather than having to send them off by letter. There's also a new observatory on the second story, which lets you view and design constellations, and a café where you can drink coffee and watch live music (K.K. Slider on Saturday nights).

The new town hall encompasses the wishing well, post office and ... (continued next page)