All of this is not to say that Home Designer lacks depth. With more than 300 villagers to design for, you’re unlikely to run out of gameplay quickly. If you’re looking for competition or collecting credit or any of those other video game tropes, however, you won’t find them here.
Nintendo named Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer perfectly. This Animal Crossing game will turn you into a designer that designs happy little homes for its creatures. It just doesn’t offer you anything else, so be warned.
Above: That house is going to be super tiny.
Spaces are small and simple
The game limits most design spaces to tiny bedroom-sized areas, so you can give up on that dream of designing gigantic mansions for all your virtual friends. You can’t scale furniture up to gigantic proportions or combine items together easily, so you’re pretty well stuck with the extensive selection of items you build up over time, as is. I didn’t immediately find a way to go back and redesign the homes of any villagers I’d already picked.
This feels a lot more like a mobile game than most of the Animal Crossing titles. You’ll find it easy to pick up and put down as you have a few minutes. When you’re looking for a quick smile, Happy Home Designer delivers. But it doesn’t have that engrossing, addictive feel so many of the Animal Crossing releases create so well. Once you’ve picked a villager to design for, you’re stuck in that interaction until you’re done, unable to swap to anything else or go back, which proves annoying, even if it’s short.
Wait, where’s MY house?
Unlike the traditional Animal Crossing games, the one house you’ll never see is your own. You don’t get to use all these cool things you collect to design your own space. This is a job, after all, and when you’re done, you leave all that behind.
That’s unfortunate but perhaps a concession made to keep from confusing other Animal Crossing players. If Happy Home Designer lets you bypass the unbelievable amount of work all this stuff takes in the other Animal Crossing experiences, it would make them feel pretty pointless from an item-accumulation point of view.
Above: Another day, another request to decipher.
Conclusion
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer feels like a minigame for fans of the series. It features some of the best characters, gives you the chance to play house with their possessions, and offers the opportunity to put your unique design flair all over the village. The selection of items grows as you complete the game, which makes it feel even deeper than the broad selection of villagers you can choose. And its control scheme is simple and perfect.
This title has some of the most modest aspirations of any of the Animal Crossing titles, but it delivers on them spectacularly. If you don’t mind making your next adventure in the franchise a home-design focused one, you’ll enjoy this.
Score: 80/100
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is available now from Nintendo for $40 for Nintendo 3DS. GamesBeat received a copy of the game for purposes of writing this review.