Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon reviews

For the worse or the best, I didn't play the original LM so I don't have that background, that being said, I struggled a lot with this game, not because it's hard but because it can be so annoying in several ways, first of all, I think it reuses a lot of its mechanics way too often, like you have to get to point A to point B see that you need or have been stolen an item which is now in point A, finish the level, then start a new level and repeat, sure you have several "mansions" but as this repeats a lot, by the third mansion you are kind of annoyed. It also doesn't' help that every mansion has this mission to track down a dog that stole something important, so you have to re-do the level from start to finish again.

Another thing that bothered me a lot were the puzzles, some of them are really clever but a lot of them are very clumsy made, also I don't know if some of them have bugs or else but I was often trapped in them because sometimes they didn't register the correct solution so I ended doing wrong things. As for the boss fights, the first one was nice but after that, every single one of them has a really irritating element to it, like using a target mechanic that is broken or luck dependant and (surprise) being repetitive, the major offenders of those things were the snow boss and the last boss, god damn.

As for the good things, the game looks beautiful and the atmosphere is great, and as I said before, there are really clever puzzles and some fun things too, but in the end, the negative aspects felt way too heavy and manage to outshine the good ones a lot. I think its episode nature (being a portable game) hurts it a lot, if it was you wandering around the mansions Resident Evil style I think the experience wouldn't be or feel so scripted and repetitive.