4/5 ★ – philip_acquaro's review of Luigi's Mansion 3.

Started: June 30th 2024 Beaten: July 2nd 2024 (Re-Play through) One of the best Switch games out there. I decided to play this again because I’ve been wanting to replay more of the series after enjoying dark moon a lot when I replayed it recently. And I figured I hadn’t played this one since release so I thought, sure why not. I’m happy to say that it holds up incredibly well. It took a majority of the DNA from Dark Moon and some of the greatest parts of the original and mixed them together into an amazing game. Each floor in the hotel is overflowing with charm and personality. There isn’t a single themed floor that they missed the mark on. I’m glad they didn’t make every one of the floors have to feel like they took place in a hotel and instead just went all out with their creative ideas, making it feel more like a theme park instead. All of the puzzles were a lot of fun to figure out with Goo-igi and sucking up ghosts is always awesome. The music and graphics were really great all the way through. Its also so refreshing having the unique portrait ghost bosses back each with their own personalities as well as being able to traverse freely again without the mission based structure or very frequent E. Gadd calls. It isn’t a perfect game in my eyes, there are still a couple annoying things like the polter kitty segments and the missing toad part that force you to back track, consequently destroying the pacing of the game. Luckily that only counts for three objectives so it’s not a major flaw, but it’s still there. The cutscenes look gorgeous and are all really cute. I loved all of Luigi’s little celebrations and how he acts with the toads, Mario, and Peach. I also like all of the normal ghost enemies. They’re fun and fit the cartoony vibe of the previous game, making it consistent for the series. However, I do wish it was more challenging to take on the ghosts as the ghost slam mechanic makes things way too easy and sometimes gets repetitive, making me miss the previous two ghost sucking mechanics. And of course, no matter how inventive and fun the cartoony luigi’s mansion vibe is, I still believe that nothing compares to the first game’s atmosphere. The first is my personal favorite game so it wasn’t going to surpass it but I wouldn’t fault you if you thought otherwise. It’s a phenomenal game and is just as much worth your time as the previous two.