“Disney Meets Animal Crossing” is such an obvious recipe for success that it’s surprising it wasn’t created 15 years ago. Disney Dreamlight Valley, which launched in Early Access last week, finally makes that a reality, offering everything you’d expect at its core. You run through a city making friends with Disney characters, helping them with basic chores and offering them gifts, while you fish, garden, clean up the city and decorate your home. (Uncle Scrooge fills the role of Tom Nook, of course.) The socialization is actually more in-depth than Animal Crossing’s, with a level system that keeps track of how tight you are, and you’ll have to convince many of your new friends to move back to your town. by helping them with various tasks such as, say, helping Remy from Ratatouille cook some meals in his restaurant. It stays close to the tried and true Animal Crossing template, but offers enough twists to define its own identity beyond the Disney nostalgia. It’s a smart take on these kinds of games and would be a must-play for any Disney fan unless they have a Switch, which is very frustrating to play.
I’ve heard it runs much smoother on PC, but the Switch version of Disney Dreamlight Valley is almost unplayable in its current state. Hard crashes back to the Switch’s main screen are perhaps the least annoying of many issues; that’s happened to me a few times, but I’ve actually never lost any progress as each crash seems to have happened right after a save. No, the biggest problem with Disney Dreamlight Valleyat least on the Switch, everything takes longer than it should, just like going to a Disney theme park.
To achieve almost everything in Dreamlight Valley, you’ll have to juggle between menus on a regular basis, and anything you have to do in those menus has just enough lag to completely frustrate you. Do you need to bring up a menu? It takes what seems like more than a second to actually open. Isn’t the specific inventory screen you’re looking for the first thing that pops up? Well, wait half a second or so for each page you have to scroll through. Did you choose the wrong item, pressed a wrong button, or do you just need to close this menu for whatever reason? You better have some patience. The Switch feels like it’s swimming through molasses when you do almost everything in this game.
It also struggles with recognizing when a mission has been completed. More than once, the game has refused to acknowledge that I’ve done everything a quest asked of me. A reboot often takes care of that, but it’s neither fun nor convenient to keep shutting down and restarting a game for it to work properly.
Even the most basic of foundations can freeze unexpectedly or take too long. The camera, which is always slow, is a real obstacle when trying to update the way your city or home looks. The interface to place and move furniture is so inherently bad that I’m assuming this is a cross-platform issue and not just an issue with the Switch version, but the pauses you face while even trying to access that menu. , Nintendo can only tease players. Whenever you have to switch between two screens, you are faced with an unreasonably long gap and have to constantly jump between screens.
I’m usually reluctant to complain about technical issues like this. They need to be abundant and ubiquitous so that I can care about them, and most importantly, really write an article about them. And I realize that Early Access games are inherently unfinished and can suffer from several issues on initial launch. But the Early Access version of Disney Dreamlight Valley is not some free beta that you can just mess around with. The game itself will be free to play when it’s officially released, but the only way to play it now is to pay for the Founder’s Pack (or by subscribing to Xbox Game Pass). The Founder’s Pack comes with a lot of incentives that you won’t get from the final free-to-play version, but they aren’t worth much if the game itself is too tedious to play.
If you want to play Disney Dreamlight Valley on the Switch today, you have to pay for it, and right now the Switch version is so annoying I can’t recommend it to anyone. The developer Gameloft (a studio that focuses on mobile games) has announced that patches are coming for the Switch version, so maybe they’ll fix everything that’s wrong and make it playable on this system. And, as I mentioned above, I’ve heard that the PC version is at least noticeably smoother than this one. (To stick will have more thoughts on soon Disney Dreamlight Valley from a writer who played the PC version.) But right now, trying to play this game on the Switch isn’t nearly worth it.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about video games, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way. He’s on Twitter @grmartin.
0 Comments