Animal crossing Amiibo Festival for the Nintendo Wii U - Our review

Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival was our first encounter with the Animal Crossing games. The characters will be familiar to those who already know the hugely popular Animal Crossing games, but to us they were new.

We were sent an amiibo pack with four of the characters and we soon had our favourites. Mine was Isabelle, J chose Cyrus to coincide with his own actual middle name, D's fave was Digby and Miss T insisted on having 'the dog with guitar' (K.K.).

Miss T choses K.K. everytime!

J with Cyrus and Mum with Isabelle

D's favourite is Digby

Having kids of varying ages (11, 9 and 3) it can prove tricky to find games and activities that we can all genuinely enjoy doing together. Most board games that we enjoy playing with the boys are too advanced for Miss T and most of the games she likes best are considered too 'childish' by J and D. So it's often a life of compromise (or arguments) - okay mostly arguments.

So it was truly refreshing to find a game that ALL of us could enjoy playing together. Simple enough for Miss T to understand and get involved in and with challenges in the form of the minigames that engaged J and D to make it fun for them too.

We all got to spend time together, without the squabbles and that was just brilliant!

I'm going to hand over to our chief gamer, J, to tell you about the game in more detail:

On Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival for the Nintendo Wii U, there is a giant board and you use amiibos to go round the board. There are special event spaces. There are also good spaces and bad spaces. Every Sunday you can buy turnips from Joan. On Monday the turnip prices are announced. The prices can go up or down during the week. 

When you play you can play for a month (which we are told would take around 1hour 15 minutes for 4 players) or set a time limit. The shortest time limit that you can set is 30 minutes. We have Cyrus, Isabelle, Digby and K.K. There are 8 amiibos that you can get. You unlock mini games by getting happy tickets. You then use amiibo cards to play the mini games. I have unlocked all of them. My favourite mini game is Balloon Island. In Balloon Island you have to hold the amiibo card on the gamepad and then take it off at the right time. Your character is floating. When you take off the card your character falls and bounces on the balloons. You have to try to get your character to land on the moving platform.

Thanks to working as a team, along with J's persistence when the rest of us were busy with other things, we managed to unlock ALL the mini games in one weekend. Quite a feat I think as I reckon it would ordinarily take a lot longer but we love a good challenge in this family.

Just look at that concentration! 

I personally love how interactive this game is with the use of amiibos being vital in gameplay - you need to touch your amiibo to the gamepad each time to roll the dice.

I think the amiibo cards features is also great for playing the mini games. This is something each of the children enjoy doing when wanting to play alone. But of course, the thing I love best is that we can all get together for that vital quality time as a family and play this game that we all enjoy so much!

Disclosure: As Nintendo Family Bloggers we were sent a download code for this game along with an Amiibo pack. All opinions are our own.