A good sequel should offer more of the same that made the games before it great while adding some significant changes that separate it as its own entry in the series. Animal Crossing: City Folk fails in both of these regards. Instead of being a new entry in the series, City Folk is a console version of its predecessor Wild World, with a fresh coat of paint and not much more. The biggest disappointment is how shallow the gameplay is despite being the latest Animal Crossing title.

The Animal Crossing series never had much of a story behind it, but what little plot it does have returns in City Folk. Again, you're moving to a new town inhabited by humanoid animals obsessed with interior design. The town is officially run by Tortimer, a regal old turtle who can usually be found snoozing at town hall, but the local store owner, Tom Nook, is really the one running the show. He lets you pick a house to move into before saddling you with the bill. To pay it off, you're forced to do odd jobs for Nook as well as other tasks such as catching bugs and fish or harvesting fruit. New to the series is the DS Suitcase which allows you to start a new town with your character from the previous game. Your clothes and accessories don't cross over though, to prevent you from manipulating the game's economy.

There's just not much to do in your town.

City Folk's only concrete objective is to pay off the debt you acquire from the various house expansions Nook forces on you. You'll spend most of your time earning bells (the game's currency) to eliminate your debt and to buy furniture to place in your home. Early on, fishing is your most lucrative option. The process involves you searching for shadows in bodies of water and waiting patiently for a bite. You can also pick fruit that grows wild in your town or plant trees of your own to earn more cash. These tasks are easier than they were in previous games, because you can now tap left or right on the d-pad to quickly access the tools you're holding, which bypasses the menu. Eventually, you'll find more ways to make money, but every last method involves selling stuff to Nook. Aside from raising cash, there's not much to do in City Folk. You can try being friendly with your neighbors, but they're nothing more than cookie cutter personalities for you to manipulate into giving you stuff.

Since the majority of your time is spent performing mundane tasks, you would think the results would be worth it, but you'd be wrong. The greatest flaw in the Animal Crossing series is the incredible lack of interactivity with the furniture you work so hard to obtain. With most of the gameplay revolving around bettering your home, it's odd that you can't really do much with the furniture aside from arranging it. You can sit in chairs, lie in beds, place things on tables, and make certain things move or make a noise, but that's it. With such a low level of interaction with the game's furniture, there isn't much incentive to play City Folk. As if this weren't bad enough, the majority of City Folk's furniture is recycled directly from Wild World.

Still, people who strive to collect every last item in a game may enjoy attempting to acquire every piece from the wide assortment of fish, bugs, and furniture offered. With Animal Crossing's 24 hour a day, 365 days a year gameplay, the local fish and insects change with the seasons, giving you different creatures to obtain all year round. Fans of in-game economies may also enjoy themselves by selling and trading items online with other players, though the fun never gets much further than seeing how much you can get for so little, since the items have no depth beyond their appearances.

Along with the established Animal Crossing gameplay returning intact in City Folk, there are a few new features, but none of them amount to anything significant. The titular city is nothing more than a strip mall of stores where several of the merchants from the previous games set up permanent shops. New to the series is the Mii Makeover, which allows you to replace your character's face with one of your Miis. However, if you try to use any of the facial accessories while wearing your Mii mask, you'll remove it completely and have to go back to the city to get another one.

Other additions include a skunk who can change the color of your tiny shoes, a guy who hands out balloons, and Gracie's ridiculously expensive seasonal furniture store. Each set features multiple items that can cost several hundred-thousand bells. There is also an auction house which allows people on your friends list to bid for items you put up. This a neat feature for anyone interested in the business aspect of the game and is probably the only forward-thinking addition featured in City Folk.

Another small feature is the ability to take pictures of your character. You can snap a photo at any time and save it to your Wii's SD card, but the game can only support one photo at a time. It would have been nice if you could go out, get some work done and goof off, and take pictures here and there so you can go back home and sort through a day's worth of photos. The feature itself is neat, but with the ability to take only one photo at a time, it's quite limited as well.

City Folk is the first game to support Wii Speak, a device that allows players to talk directly to their friends online. Wii Speak is a bit different from other video game microphones in that it's intended to capture the voices of everyone in the room. This feature doesn't really have any game-related purpose in City Folk, since only one person can play at a time. It's also no reason to praise the game, as this is the first time voice chat has been offered in a Wii title since the console was released more than two years ago.

City Folk features the same childish charm, but looks and sounds great.

The multiplayer experience of City Folk is very similar to Wild World's. You can host up to three other players in your town, but there still isn't much to do together aside from trading items - a process that can be quite frustrating because it requires players to just drop their goods on the ground. If you're interested in exchanging things, this can provide a decent distraction, but that's about all it is. As always, you'll need friend codes to play with other people.

The unique style of the Animal Crossing series has never looked better than in City Folk. Some may be turned off by the childish appearance of the game and the odd concept behind it, but the colorful visuals and subdued yet catchy tunes really give the game its own identity. In town, there is more diverse geography than the series has seen so far. Hills, valleys, cliffs, splitting rivers, waterfalls, and more can be found throughout the environment and they all look great. All of songs in Wild World return in City Folk, but that's not really a problem as the series has always had good music. K.K. Slider, the guitar playing dog, returns too, playing his unique songs at the local cafe' every Saturday night. At the same time, the game's audio will accentuate just how little City Folk does to offer anything new.

Nintendo has seen fit to take a three year-old DS game, pretty it up for the Wii, and tack on a few shallow features on top of an increased price tag. Animal Crossing: City Folk is technically the best game in the series, offering more in a single package than its predecessors. To returning players, however, there's not much reason to buy the game. Shallow gameplay and a failure to offer much new content leaves City Folk feeling like an insulting holiday offering that could have been far better.