The main results of the paper are the following: 1. Every locally finite affine complete variety admits a near unanimity term; 2. A locally finite congruence distributive variety is affine complete if and only if all its algebras with no proper subalgebras are affine complete and the variety is generated by one of such algebras. The first of these results sharpens a result of McKenzie asserting that all locally finite affine complete varieties are congruence distributive. The second one generalizes the result by Kaarli and Pixley that characterizes arithmetical affine complete varieties.