Luigi's Mansion 3 is a dreary, repetitive, and tedious game almost from minute one, and clocking in at nearly 15 hours, is one long nightmare to play. It’s an unusual misstep from Nintendo, whose major 1st party tentpole games almost always provide a fun, fluid, and charming gameplay experience that flows well throughout. Luigi's Mansion 3's many failings, including its complete inability to do this, makes more sense upon learning that it wasn’t developed in-house by Nintendo, but instead outsourced (like Luigi's Mansion 2) to developer Next Level Games. This fact at least helps to explain why it suffers from issues almost never present in Nintendo's in-house releases, such as the lack of ability to skip pre-boss cutscenes after dying and having to retry them, along with things like a poor menu interface and bosses that attempt to be so "cinematic" that it sometimes feels like it takes forever before you're allowed to begin damaging them.
The biggest problem though by far that plagues Luigi's Mansion 3 is that its gameplay never feels fun or controls well, and that it fails to change or evolve in any meaningful way from the opening moments until the credits roll.
I'll admit up top that this is my first trip in many years into the Luigi's Mansion universe. I found the Gamecube original to be fun back in 2001 but remember little about it, except that the mansion was more exploration-driven, in an almost Resident Evil style, whereas Luigi's Mansion 3 is designed in the style of a hotel, with each floor serving as its own "level." Progression takes the form of completing a floor and snagging the Elevator Button that allows you to proceed to the next one. It's more along the lines of what I understand Luigi's Mansion 2 does with the formula, though admittedly I haven't played the 2nd one.
Given how long it's been since I played the original Luigi's Mansion, it's possible that its poor gameplay mechanics have been here from the beginning, and that I just didn't remember how unfun sucking the enemies up with the vacuum cleaner is; how even by the game's end I never fully got the hang of whether the aiming was inverted or not, how almost every single enemy variant goes down the exact same way, or how the vacuum cleaner never gains any new abilities throughout the game. I’m not sure if these issues existed in the original, though I feel like I’d have remembered liking it a lot less if they had, but regardless, the core gameplay here just isn't any fun, and all too quickly stops offering any new surprises. Boss battles look cool, but other than one or two fairly inspired fights, the rest of them are defeated in the exact same way that the other enemies are. When the boss fights do step outside their typical comfort zone, they feature slow, long move cycles that you're forced to wait through until you have the one scripted opportunity to damage them. If you happen to miss it, you have to wait through them all over again. And repeat until the boss is finally defeated.
This same basic flaw applies across the rest of Luigi's Mansion 3 as well. The vast majority of the puzzles the game provides you are solved by happening to shine your Dark Light device at the right object in a given room to trigger a path forward. Rather than being fun, the requirement that upon entering a room you must take your Dark Light device out and spend time shining it at all the walls and objects in search of a path forward feels like busy work and even further slows the pacing of an already slow game. On the few occasions where the developers do provide more elaborate puzzles to you, their mechanics are incredibly poorly explained, (the TV puzzle being the worst offender) and these too feel like they go on for far too long, even once the puzzle is figured out.
Luigi's Mansion 3's big new addition is the fairly gimmicky Gooigi, a goo-like replica of Luigi who can be summoned and
controlled, with you able to switch between one or the other on the fly to
solve certain puzzles or to defeat certain enemies. Given how relatively little
Gooigi is used, though, and the fact that he has no personality and very little
narrative interaction with the title character, all gives him the feeling of
being a Nintendo-mandated addition that the developers had very little
enthusiasm for. Indeed at times it almost feels like the game forgets about him
entirely for hours on end. As with Luigi himself, Gooigi's moveset and
abilities don't change at all throughout the game.
There are secrets to be found in many of
the hotel's areas; all just lead to collectable money, which is essentially Luigi's
Mansion 3's currency. But with a whopping 3 items (!) available to purchase in
the shop for the entirety of the adventure, going out of your way to find the
hidden dollar bills exists with no incentive to speak of, other than an
arbitrary letter grade given to you upon the story's completion. I don't
remember what grade I received and really couldn't be bothered to care,
honestly.
There's just one final thing I'll get
into, but it's one that's such a glaring example of bad game design that I
wouldn't be doing it justice without awarding it its own paragraph. On certain
occasions after clearing a Floor and earning the Elevator Button to progress to
the next one, the game will immediately snatch it back from you courtesy of an
annoying cat ghost character, which then forces you to backtrack through
previously explored areas and floors in an attempt to catch the cat ghost to
get the Button back. When you do manage to find it, you have to fight it the
same…exact…way… every single time, before it'll relinquish the Button to you.
These segments can take up to 30 minutes at a time of retracing your steps and
fighting this repetitive boss again and again, and it becomes increasingly
frequent as the game rolls on. It adds nothing to the experience, it's
frustrating, it's uninspired, and it almost immediately erodes any satisfaction
given by clearing a Floor and thinking you’re about to progress
to the next one.
I was genuinely surprised when I was hit with the realization a few hours in that I just wasn't going to like this game; that this was all that Luigi's Mansion 3 was, and all that it would be. Nintendo games, though they can have their flaws in
many other areas, are usually able to at the very least get fun gameplay and
gameplay mechanics down. They usually feature a true sense of progression, with
your characters earning new moves and abilities over the course of the adventure to
shake things up and deliver an evolving gameplay experience. With Luigi's
Mansion 3, I can say with pretty full confidence that if you're not thrilled
by the controls, mechanics, and abilities that Luigi has in the first 30
minutes, then you won't like the rest of the game, because that's really all that it has to offer. The graphics are great and presented
in full 1080p, but the claustrophobic rooms and corridors that you’re forced to
tread through in order to reach one repetitive enemy encounter after another
makes the sharp image hard to appreciate. Coupled with tedious gameplay
mechanics, unskippable cutscenes, and a forgettable Gooigi gimmick, there’s
very little to recommend Luigi’s Mansion 3 by, and definitely one of Nintendo’s
bigger disappointments this gen. Stay far away.
1.5/5
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