..:: ZOMBiE Destinee ::..

Sunday, March 16, 2014
[Review] Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon
[ZOMBiE CyGiG] ranted at 5:13 PM --- Post#6206786703444059072

6/10 Good

The game puts you in third person, controlling Luigi to solve puzzle and and capture ghosts around the Evershade Valley. Very similar to the Ghost Busters, you use a vacuum to suck a ghost in after stunning him with a flashlight. Using the suck and blow function of the vacuum, you can operate several mechanism like fans, balloons, pulling away carpets, closing port holes, operate pull switches etc to solve puzzles to advance. The flashlight can be used on certain light sensitive locks or to kill minions for cash and health. A dark light is also give, which can reveal mission items in the room hidden by Boo and extract items from painting.

The game is technically good, in the sense it is very well presented. Almost every single item in the room rattles and shakes when you use your vacuum. You can interact with multiple items in the level even though most does not yield anything. Spiders wandering in the background, foliage rustling as you walk past as Luigi humming to the BGM, and brightening of the room after a room is cleared adds on to the atmosphere of the game. The light shafts from the flashlight and the effects of dark light behaves in a believable manner. The 3D complemented the above, especially the rendering of the flashlight, and even at max level, felt comfortable. The effort put into building the physics of the game make the game feels like a 2013/2014 title despite the incredible inferior hardware of the 3DS.

Online features are great, where you can create lobby and wait for friends or world wide players to join your room just like most PC games would allow you to. Online games are similar to the campaign where a bunch of players are put together to either capture all the ghosts, or to escape the room. One impressive mention is that the Download play allows the other player (without the game card) to access nearly all the features of game instead of a strip down version like Mario Kart 7 or Street Fighter IV.

However, the good stuff ends there. The game features a in game currency which can be collected by exploring the levels. You can collect money, gems and find Boos. Finding all the Boos gives you bonus levels which is great, but the same could not be said for cash and gems. Cash gives you upgrade to your monster sucking machine, but I find the main benefits is to rip more cash from the ghost than doing devastating damages. It also upgrades your dark light, which is pretty useless as it cools down very fast. In all, I feel that spending effort to collect cash leads on to no real benefits but to grab more cash. Collecting gems almost has no benefits at all.

There are two irritating levels in the game. The first is boss level of Haunted Towers, which have you run up a flight of stairs with three sections, take a random guess which is not haunted, and if it is you slide down and repeat. I couldn't exactly remember how long i spent doing that but it was around 20 to 30 minutes. The actual boss was easy. It makes me wonder why would the level designer do something so distasteful. The other one is Paranormal Chaos, which has a sudden spike in difficulty. Almost none of the other missions has a timer and players are usually encouraged to take things slow and careful, but things reversed in this mission and even if you could defeat all the ghosts, it hardly means you have time to do so. Other than those, the part where you need to balance Luigi on a beam is pretty hair splitting as well, especially when playing on the move as it relies on the gyroscope. I found it best to simply put your 3DS on a level ground and advance.

The most game breaking flaw of Luigi's Mansion is the long levels. Most levels easily last from 20 to 40 minutes if you spend your time exploring. I have hit an hour before for some levels and having to retry a level multiple times as well. That is crippling for a mobile console, where players should be able to take up and put down anytime, considering one checkpoint in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag or one round of Rush in Battlefield 4 on PC usually last only 10 to 15 minutes. Although you can close your 3DS to pause the game, you cannot swap out to another game. There are no checkpoints in middle of a level as well, meaning you have to finish the entire level to save. If you loses halfway due to some silly mistake, you will have to redo the whole level. There is a bone you can find which restores your health full once if you fall, but the bone seems to be random and it could be pretty hard to find and it will add time to the already lengthy level. You can only carry one bone at one time and you cannot bring it to the next level. It could be extremely frustrating if you spend your time looking for those not-so-useful coins and gems, just to fall near the end of a level and having to redo the whole stage again from scratch. I feel that more checkpoints should be implemented mid levels, or better still, being able to save anytime in the level.

Overall, Luigi's Mansion could be an excellent game, but ruined by some poor game mechanics and design and test the patience of gamers with lengthy levels on a mobile platform with no checkpoints.

View/Post Comments (0)