I’ve been a huge fan of the Luigi’s Mansion series since 2001 when we got the first taste of Luigi’s spooky adventures and I’m happy to say that Luigi’s Mansion 3 from Next Level Games significantly improves upon the series and hearkens back to what made the series great to begin with.
I’ve spent about 2-3 hours with the game so far and have begun to make decent progress with my goal of finding all of the hotel elevator buttons and rescuing Mario and friends. It’s safe to say that the game is really fun.
The simple yet effective premise here is that Luigi and all of his friends are invited to a luxurious hotel for a much-needed vacation but it turns out that King Boo has escaped captivity again and ends up kidnapping Mario, Peach, and Toad, with Luigi being left to rescue them.
This leads Luigi to run into Professor E. Gadd who tasks Luigi with finding all of the missing buttons on the elevator, which are found by defeating boss ghosts.
The hotel has dozens of different floors with each one sporting a unique design. You’ll find a floor with a coffee shop, another with a greenhouse, and another with a barbershop, making every single room different from the last.
And speaking of rooms, there is so much stuff to interact with that it’s ridiculous, in a good way. You can pretty much suck up any and everything with the new Poltergust that comes loaded with a bunch of new features.
You can press the triggers at the same time to knock items away from you in an instant, you can “summon” Gooigi, and you can throw a plunger that allows you to pull heavy objects.
I’ve been spending so much time interacting with every little thing to make sure that I find all of the secrets like money and gems, which brings me to my main point: please play Luigi’s Mansion 3 docked on a television if you can.
I know that one of the main reasons that the Switch is so popular is the ability to play console games on the go in handheld mode, but Luigi’s Mansion 3 is such a gorgeous and highly-detailed experience that if you were to play on the small Switch screen, you lose some of those details.
Small objects and items are harder to see in handheld mode and things start to look cluttered. As someone who rarely plays my Switch in docked mode, I found myself really enjoying the game on my TV just because it’s so pretty.
There are a few gripes that I have with the game though, but they definitely don’t outweigh all of the good stuff here. For example, I find that the game is very bright, for the most part, leaving Luigi’s flashlight to be useless at some points and not necessary at all.
The ghosts remain similar to the ones found in Luigi’s Mansion 2, so they’re more silly and comical than spooky and interesting.
They remind me of the minions from Despicable Me and don’t have the most unique designs, but I still found myself chuckling at points when they were messing around with Luigi and participating in random antics.
But yeah, Luigi’s Mansion 3 is a really good game so far and If the gameplay continues to be as fun as it is, my upcoming review should be mostly positive, but we’ll see.
