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I had quite an Animal Crossing Christmas. Not so much because I wanted this game, but because it came with my New Nintendo 3DS. I decided to play it myself and see what this new take on the Animal Crossing series had to offer.

Happy Home Designer uses the standard formula of home design in Animal Crossing. You are a new employee at Nook Homes as the latest and greatest newcomer home designer. Your task in this game is to accept the numerous Animal Crossing citizen's request to design and coordinate their new homes.

As you accept these requests, you are given new furniture and various other designing options to give your designs more depth and creativity. You start off only able to design the interior initially, but as you progress, you will be able to change the house's design and even add backyard features. Player's are also given requests for what kind of home the citizen wants ranging from an all blue room, a pirate style room, or a home gym. Eventually, you will also have to help give the local town a face lift, designing new facilities from a school to numerous restaurants. Needless to say, your time spent in game is designing.

Because this is an Animal Crossing game, it needs to stay simplistic. Your options start off very limited, but as you fulfill requests, your creativity options also rise. This does mean though that your early game is quite slow and simple. Additionally, each resident usually includes at most 3 furniture pieces that must be included in their homes, otherwise they get upset and will not allow you to finish their home design. Other than that, there is no scoring system and you do not receive bells based on the "cohesiveness" of the home. You can slap together a half-hearted job and the citizen will still love it. It really makes it seem like our efforts are not necessary and you will really have to motivate yourself to do honest to goodness creative design. You can always change their home design later whenever you please if you are unsatisfied with your job or find a new furniture piece another would "love" in case such a thing happens. Additionally, your character has clothing options, but only your shirt cannot change and you will have to unlock the other clothing pieces by completing a certain citizen's house.

If you have Amiibo or any of the Amiibo cards, you can immediately "call" a client to design their home. For most important NPCs like Tom Nook, K.K. Slider, or Isabelle, they usually have no actual requests and will allow you to design their homes however you want. It convinces you to go and buy the cards and amiibo, but its not necessary for the game and is more of a fun feature.

Nonny's Rating: 7/10. With no real challenge to the game it lacks that sort of sense of accomplishment, but it is a really simple DiY game that is relaxing and can be fun if you are okay with more casual simple play. If you are expecting the living daily life of Animal Crossing, this game is not going to meet that expectation.

Nonny's Tip: none really. If you are willing to spend your stocked up play Coins, you can spend them for more design options, but they aren't all too necessary.