Animal Crossing: New Horizons Switch 2 Edition review – Update 3.0 is a trip

Nintendo’s lockdown mega hit returns with a new Switch 2 version of Animal Crossing and a free update that adds new features and long wished for quality of life options.

Nintendo has a well-earned reputation for making strange decisions but their treatment of Animal Crossing: New Horizons ascends new heights of inscrutability. Although Animal Crossing has long been a key franchise (it celebrates its 25th anniversary in April) the release of New Horizons in March 2020, right at the start of lockdown, propelled it into Nintendo’s A-list, becoming the second best-selling game on the Switch 1, behind only Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

That unexpected success led to a typically Nintendo style response where, despite it being essentially a live service game – just without any microtransactions – they suddenly stopped all support in 2021, following the release of Update 2.0 and the Happy Home Paradise paid-for expansion. Why they stopped then, and why they released two big updates right at the same time, is a mystery that has become no clearer with time.

One guess was that Nintendo was fast-tracking a sequel, and needed their developers to be undistracted, but that hasn’t proven to be the case at all. This Switch 2 Edition was announced out of the blue, alongside Update 3.0, which implies that a brand new game is actually some way off. Or maybe it doesn’t, since it’s clear that nothing Nintendo does can ever be taken for granted.

Although there are obvious parallels between Happy Home Paradise and Update 2.0, the new additions to New Horizon are much less significant. This is reflected in the fact that the upgrade pack for the Switch 2 version is cheaper even than the ones for the two Zelda games. Animal Crossing is not a franchise that sells itself on the complexity of its graphics (although the ones in New Horizons are much better than any previous game) so there’s not really much to do in that regard, other than up the resolution to 4K in TV mode.

Nintendo hasn’t said anything about performance improvements, but our town used to chug quite a bit in certain areas, where we’d put a lot of items outside, and that doesn’t happen now, even with the additional complexities of it snowing at the moment. Load times are quicker too, although still longer than you’d like.

Beyond that, you’ve now got support for up to 12 players online at once – assuming they’re all playing the Switch 2 version – and support for the Switch 2 camera, so it shows everyone’s face in a little circle above their character.

The camera is also used with the only new item: a megaphone which you can shout a villager’s name into and they’ll tell you where they are, which is exactly as inessential as it sounds. What’s much more useful is mouse controls when designing a room. Even with the low resolution of the grid on which items are place, it’s much easier to design things, including drawing pictures, using the Joy-Con as a mouse.

Switching between mouse and Joy-Con control isn’t very elegant though. You can’t use a Pro Controller and just pick up a Joy-Con 2 when you need it, so you have to either switch via the controller option on the home screen or just give up using the Pro Controller altogether, which isn’t very convenient. It’s also annoying that when you’re designing, and you switch to the menu where you select items, you have to go back to using the standard controls again, rather than just carrying on with the mouse.

Is Animal Crossing: New Horizons Update 3.0 worth playing?

In terms of the Switch 2 Edition, everything else is exactly the same as the original game, but there are some notable additions via Update 3.0, which is available for free and for the Switch 1 version as well. So you don’t need to have the Switch 2 Edition to enjoy any of the new stuff.

The centrepiece of the update is a hotel run by Kapp’n’s family, but it’s yet another variation on Happy Home Designer et al., where the hotel owner asks you to decorate different rooms according to different themes. We’re not going to pretend we didn’t enjoy it – we haven’t played the game in two or three years, so seeing our old town and getting back into the grove was a lot of fun – but it’s a pretty unoriginal idea at this point.

You get paid in tokens that allow you to acquire unique items and clothing, but you can also earn them by crafting items that the hotel asks for. You can keep doing this infinitely, which is a bit odd, and if you’re a veteran player, who has lots of DIY recipes, that instantly ruins the token economy.

Outside of the hotel, there is quite a bit to buy, with special The Legend Of Zelda items apparently being added, amongst other Nintendo nick-nacks. This includes playable consoles, a feature that the original Animal Crossing on GameCube had, but we haven’t seen any of that yet. But that’s the difficulty of reviewing any game in the series, since you’re only meant to play it for half an hour or so each day and some elements take several days to fully reveal themselves.

You do get a bunch of Lego items straight away though, so there is a fair amount of brand new items right from the start. On top of that, you have Mr Resetti wandering around, who’ll offer to clear up your town and remove whole categories of items for you. He’s a shadow of his former bombastic self though and we’d rather they’d invented a new character than water down his original personality to such degree.

On a more positive note, there’s now the long wished for option to craft multiple items of the same type at once. Plus, you can use resources stored at home, if you don’t happen to be holding enough of what you need.

Those options would’ve been a godsend five years ago but the one thing the game still doesn’t provide is the option to create more than one island and have two towns on the go at once. There is a compromise though, in that you can decorate up to three dream islands, but that’s not really the same thing.

New Horizons was already a great game and while the improvements here are minor so is the price increase, although most of the best stuff is free via Update 3.0 and has nothing to do with the Switch 2 Edition. Nevertheless, we’d still strongly recommend the game to anyone that’s never played it. And if you’re already a fan, the small asking price, and the new features of Update 3.0, are enough of an excuse to dive back in.

We’re definitely ready for a sequel though and it’s frustrating that there’s now absolutely no way to guess when it might arrive, unless Nintendo drops some kind of clue. New Horizons was by far the best entry in the series, so that combined with its unexpected commerical success sets a very high bar for whatever comes next. These new updates only give a faint hint as to what that might be but whatever it is, we hope it isn’t far off.

Formats: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: £54.99 or £4.19 upgrade pack
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EPD
Release Date: 15th January 2026
Age Rating: 3

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