Laid-Back Camp All-in-One!! Review – A Beautiful Game with All the Ups and Downs of Camping

After a string of delays, pushbacks, and surprises, Laid-Back Camp All-in-One!! is finally here, providing a camping experience that faithfully replicates the aesthetics and style of the anime and manga series it’s based on.

This is the kind of title that pops by every now and then that looks really good and adapts the charm of its source material perfectly, but has a gameplay formula that might not appeal to everyone. That’s because surprisingly Laid-Back Camp All-In-One is a social and simulation game that plays incredibly similar to something like Uma Musume Pretty Derby, along with all of the RNG that comes along with it.

Whether or not that kind of gameplay will stick with you though, this title does have a whole lot to offer for fans of the anime and those who have yet to see it, making it a fun title for players in both camps to enjoy, depending on how much luck you’re able to tolerate in your games.

▍A Spot-On Recreation of the Anime’s Charm

The first thing that becomes apparent when you boot up Laid-Back Camp All-in-One is how well it adapts everything from the anime onto a mobile game, everything from its visuals, music, and interface is lovingly crafted to be just like its source material. This makes it great for fans of the anime, as it really makes it feel like you’re involved in an episode of the show, making your own episodes along the way.

It also means those that never got into the show can get a good idea of what makes the show fun, as Laid-Back Camp All-In-One’s story segments faithfully recreate the events of the series, especially since most of its voice clips are taken directly from the show. While the characters are depicted as chibis, it doesn’t take away from their charm as they still maintain most of the facial expressions from the show and are quite expressive. It’ll give you a good idea of what the show’s like, while still keeping enough out of it to make the actual show itself a great watch after you’ve played the game.

Outside of that, Laid-Back Camp All-in-One features a whole load of items you’d expect for a camping simulator, there are tons of items, character variants, and cards to collect. A good chunk of the outfits and items don’t appear in the anime and make for some interesting new additions you can place in your campsite, giving you quite a range of things to place in an area to make your own ideal home for these girls.

Music and sound effects are mentioned spot on. You can even edit what songs you hear in the main menu from the settings, and another neat thing is you can change the campsite’s time of day to match your device or set it to any time of day for the perfect photo. Laid-Back Camp All-In-One even uses the anime’s first theme song during its gacha, which is a nice touch.

It looks fantastic, but there are a few things that need to be pointed out, and that’s the game’s text and translations. It’s no secret that Laid-Back Camp All-in-One’s translation is… lacking, in fact, it seems like it’s machine translated.

The translation can be wonky at times, and while it has fixed a lot of its broken text in many areas, sometimes UI banners will still appear in Japanese instead of English, and some in-game text and explanations can still be a little weird, which makes understanding some game mechanics hard.

Also, this may be an oversight but Laid-Back Camp All-In-One really likes to use the “Kokodanyan” sound to tell you to literally do anything, either in its tutorial or on the main menu when reminding you of your missions, which gets old really quickly and becomes quite a nuisance the more you play and makes you wonder how they left that in the game. This sounds like a nitpick, but this game’s tutorial is very long, and it starts to get old, and annoying real fast.

This game eats a ton of batteries from your phone. While you can turn it too low to mitigate that, it still eats up quite a lot of batteries and can make even the most recent phones heat up. Among other things, Laid-Back Camp All-In-One also frequently crashed on me, and would often also make the screen freeze and not accept any inputs, which was definitely frustrating given that the game has been delayed multiple times.

Thankfully the developers have also been aware of many of Laid-Back Camp All-in-One‘s issues, so these may be fixed by the time you’re reading this.

▍Gameplay that’s as Relaxing as it is Random

When it came to Laid-Back Camp All-In-One I had 0 expectations on how this game would play. I imagined in my head it would just be about base building and sending characters to collect parts or maybe doing a few minigames, a bit like Animal Crossing and just hanging out at home, though had no idea how that’d work in a mobile game economy.

The real meat and potatoes of Laid-Back Camp All-in-One is the Camping mode, that’s when you realize that this isn’t just a camping simulator, it’s actually Uma Musume Pretty Derby, but with camping.

If like me you have no idea what that actually means, we’ll learn about it together. In camps, you’ll pick from a camping event that can take up multiple days to complete. Each camping session is split into four segments, Morning, Day, Evening, and Night. Each segment has a mission, and you have a limited number of turns to prepare for that mission so your trip goes smoothly.

During each trip, you’ll be controlling the group’s leader which is different on each trip. You’ll spend your stamina on an action that raises a combination of stats like Relationship, Satisfaction, Coziness, Warmth, and Healing. The goal is to get these stats as high as possible before the mission begins to have a better chance of completing them for more rewards.

You can also spend skill points to give you bonus points depending on the type of mission. These skills can only be activated once per mission, so it’s another layer of decision making you need to make during the day.

Along with raising these stats you can also trigger random events based on the Costumes, Gear, and Support Cards you brought into the trip, and you can also learn new skills by doing actions that have a light bulb icon on it. If your stamina is too low your action has a chance to fail, reducing the team’s motivation and making it even harder to raise those stats.

At its core it’s a balancing act of choosing which actions you want to do, weighing them behind how much stamina you have and what points you need while also making sure you can trigger the special interactions. The actions also get leveled up the more you use them, rewarding you for smartly planning your moves.

It’s simple, and while your stats do have a visible impact on your score at the end of the session early on your stats won’t have much of an impact on Laid-Back Camp All-in-One’s missions. You’ll be trying your best to go to the missions and regardless of how well you thought you perform, you may fail the majority of the mission and still get an S rank, or pass most of it and still get a B Rank. This makes Laid-Back Camp All-In-One seem random at many times and can lead to pretty frustrating results.

▼ Sometimes You’ll get a B rank for a Mission even if you did well…

▼ Or you get an S rank even if you failed almost everything!

While that may be the case, there are a lot of things you can do to influence the results in the game, from leveling up the character outfits to adjusting the gears and other cards brought into a stage. Each piece of gear has different stats and variables that can affect a mission, so if you can wrap your head around it, there are a lot of variables and things that you can use.

When I started picking up higher rarity characters and managing my stamina better I was able to more consistently pick up A ranks in missions, but there are still many times when the result would be completely random. This is just something you’ll have to accept in a game like this, and whether you like randomness or not, it’s one of the qualities that drive people to keep playing this game.

If you’re totally fine with RNG in your games and can get into this simulation aspect, then Laid-Back Camp All-in-One is actually pretty fun. The only other major issue is how long each camping session is. Completing a single camping session can take multiple minutes at a time with how many buttons, short scenes, and loading you have to watch, and with how many of these you have to complete to do your dailies, this game can get pretty tiring to play and gets repetitive if you’re not pacing out your sessions, which most players won’t do cause it’s almost a habit to complete your dailies for the day and move on.

▼ A single camp session can usually take around 5-10 minutes when sped up.

I have a pretty fun time enjoying Laid-Back Camp All-in-One’s gameplay formula, but these flaws can turn an otherwise fun experience into just busywork and grinding if you’re not in the right state of mind when playing it. The best way to enjoy this game is to do it like the girls, relax and just not think about it too hard. Accept whatever results you get but still try your best to aim for that score, you’ll get your good rewards eventually the more you progress and earn better gear, so there’s no use rushing it early on.

▍Share the Experience Easily!

Outside of these modes, Laid-Back Camp does offer quite a number of nice features, most of them focused not on camping but on its social elements and home.

Looping back to the home page, when setting up your campsite you can set up whatever items you’ve earned from crafting to make your own idyllic campsite. You can even edit the positions and rotations of characters and objects, and even make them gather around for a photo which is nice.

Player profiles can also be customized with stuff to place on a pinboard, commemorating your achievements and sharing your best moments with friends. Speaking of friends you can even go camping with them, as you can set up campsites where you and your friends can visit together in real-time, and also set up stuff around the site with whatever you have, which is a nice touch for maintaining the game’s friendly camping atmosphere.

Playing together with friends will grant you more items for making the campsite better and completing daily objectives like doing a camping run or other small tasks, helping everyone share in the joy and rewards together.

Laid-Back Camp All-in-One even has “Circles” which function similarly to clans or groups in other games, letting you earn some free stuff by playing with others. These aren’t core features of the game but it’s nice to see the game incorporate these elements into what could have very easily been a single-player-only experience.

▍Not the Most Laid-Back, but Still Quite Fun

Laid-Back Camp All-in-One is a great game for fans of the anime and those that just want to see cute girls doing cute things. Great visuals, sound, and music make for an experience that’s equally relaxing and quite unique from many other titles you may be used to today that involve combat or frenetic gameplay.

Whether the gameplay is enough to keep you hooked is another issue entirely. While the simulation and leveling gameplay can be quite engaging if you can wrap your head around its mechanics, each game session does take quite a long compared to other mobile games, and its heavy reliance on RNG makes it feel like you’re not always in control. While that causes a lot of gameplay variance, it can also be downright frustrating at times.

Despite that Laid-Back Camp All-in-One is still a pretty fun game to have, and someone like me who didn’t think I’d enjoy this genre can find it to be a pretty decent time killer to have in the background. While its RNG can get frustrating, there’s still a lot of charm to look forward to in this game, as long as you take a Laid-Back approach to it.

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