4/5 ★ – craiglezzz's review of Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon.

Just finished Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon for the 3DS, and I just don't understand the negative feedback this game has gotten over the years. Having now beaten all three Luigi's Mansion games, I can confidently say that it is one of my favorite gaming trilogies and a truly worthwhile experience from beginning to end. Dark Moon ditches the "open-world" style of the first Luigi's Mansion game for a much more linear, mission-style approach. While this has received a lot of negative criticism, I think it works great for the platform that the game is on. The 3DS works great as a system that you pick up for 30-40 minutes or so at a time, and a general mission structure works great for that frame. My one criticism of the game is that some of the missions can be quite repetitive, with many involving the same narrative beats, but the game makes up for this by sending Luigi to multiple different mansions throughout the game, and all of them play very differently from the others. In terms of gameplay, this game still contains the same addicting ghost-sucking loop that the first one introduced, and it feels even more refined here. New ghost types are also introduced that add some extra variety to the enemy types that you encounter throughout the game. This is also the most difficult of the three Luigi's Mansion games, particularly with the last few missions of the game, and that is a welcome addition to any Nintendo game, as many of them can sometimes err on the side of being too easy. Overall, this is another fantastic outing from Luigi's flagship series, albeit probably my least favorite of the trilogy overall.