We enter the seventh floor of the hotel of this new installment, which presents its credentials to be one of the greats of the year.
There are a number of games born on portable consoles that feel somewhat limited by the characteristics of the hardware in which they were released. Luigi's Mansion 2 was surely one of those cases. An ambitious, imaginative and brave title in a proposal that gave the impression that a domestic console could have achieved much more, as in the original 2001 delivery to Game Cube. After playing a new almost final demo of Luigi's Mansion 3 we realize that, without making much noise, we may be facing one of the biggest of the year on Nintendo Switch.
Because everything feels very well thought out, designed to take advantage of the benefits offered by high definition, designed so that each phase is more complex in its structure than the previous one and that, with the passing of the phases, we realize that Nintendo has Of course, this production is of the greatest possible caliber, a triple A candidate for everything in the catalog of the Joy-Con machine.
Qualitative and quantitative evolution; a mansion was small
We played for an hour on the seventh floor of the hotel; a new contact that has improved noticeably in terms of what we saw in E3 2019 and Gamescom this past August. The great incentive of this build is that we have been able to play the cooperative mode, angular axis of this expertise. Before, let's get in position: Luigi wants to climb to the top of the floor using the elevator, but it is damaged because some ghosts have disarmed it, leaving the necessary pieces scattered to restore its use.
That is where Luigi comes into play, with his Succinants, and the task of finding all those elements. We liked to recover the sensations of LM2, those that made us feel sometimes immersed in a point and click where, almost by default, we interact with everything aspiring, expelling air, applying ultraviolet light or throwing a plunger, one of the new functions of which we will talk to you next. Everything, simply by knowing what can happen.
And things happen, many. The unpredictability of the game is constant, but to achieve it you need a good presentation and a better staging. Luigi's Mansion 3 is left over in this regard. We have the fairest and closest graphic analogies at home, with the recent odyssey of his brother as the main comparative focus: it looks spectacular. The color contrast is used very intelligently; In fact, Next Level Games, a studio that repeats the position of the project, plays with color. We give you a simple case: in one of the areas of the seventh floor we have to slide along a line that we must aspire to. The trick is that the color of the surface, where we hang from a thread, is the same color as the vacuum. The result? We fell without realizing it.
Be careful where you step …
It is a warning, one of many, that we are in constant danger, that the design of the scenarios is fervently waiting for us to screw up to joke at our casualty. You have to be careful, because it does not depend only on what you do actively as a player, but also what happens around you. And what about lighting, perhaps the point that allows Luigi's Mansion 3 to advance in its task to transcend and that, on paper, could not seem so important. The flashlight now takes more prominence than ever for how it impacts around it and how helpful it is at times of maximum tension to elucidate the presence of ghosts. Believe us: it is one of the most leading games on the platform.
Let's enter the rooms: interaction and surprise
The extravagance of some situations is also a hallmark. From fortuitous appearances of plants that we would not imagine seeing inside a building of this nature through vacuuming the sheets of a bed and taking us in the process some other cushions … Outlining half a smile is easy at all times, especially when it has been accentuated the number of elements that react to our presence in the rooms. The innovation is moderate, everything is said, with respect to the second part in playable matter. The scheme is the same, but this is not necessarily bad – at least in these early stages of the adventure – because each section has been improved, expanded and become more interactive.
Now we can also release pliers to make a windy effect. The game wants to show off realism in physics, so it invites you to try. "What if…?". In one of the rooms we found a lot of watermelons; One of them was huge. We had to think how to destroy it to free the passage. We throw a sucker, we start to pull back and … nothing. Hands were missing. Welcome to the local multiplayer cooperative mode of Luigi's Mansion 3.
The suction cup, one of the novelties that we celebrate the most.
The cooperative mode of Luigi's Mansion 3 is not an additive, it is a native element
There is a big difference between those games whose cooperative local multiplayer mode feels an extra, an addition. Additional. In Luigi's Mansion 3 it is not like that, it is an element with which the video game is born, and it shows. The structure of the phases has been thought to be enjoyed in company from beginning to end. Hence the greater ability to move on the surface; that there are carnivorous plants that shout for each player to step aside to open each profile of his huge mouth, the replacement of the camera according to what moments …
Betting so hard for the local cooperative mode is dangerous, the virtue lies in how to find the balance so that, whatever the player decides, if doing it alone or accompanied, do not feel that something is missing. That's why we played the first half of the demo alone. So that, once the level is completed, we will proceed to make the final stretch of the same and the final boss in company and feel the differences.
Better in company. The watermelon also shattered the bathtub behind.
It is early to reach conclusions, but it works. There was a situation that made a difference in this regard. We were in a room against a small boss with a carnivorous plant and, for some reason, it occurred to someone to leave a chainsaw there. While Gomiluigi – the rubber partner who acts as Player 2 – took this tool to cut the stem of the plant, we were sucking. The task required coordination and communication, something difficult if it had not been locally.
The final boss was also very funny. Grace is in finding the pattern, in knowing what the ghost's shortcut of movements will be and what its weak point is. In this case it was similar: while one drew attention with flashes of light and noise, the other positioned itself behind to aspire at the moment it was vulnerable.
Activating multiplayer mode is as fast as immediate. Simply press the right joystick and connect another control if we are not alone. In case of playing alone, there will be phases that also require the activation of Gomiluigi to do tasks in small puzzles. For example, getting on an elevator while the other character starts it.
Finally, we want to highlight the improvement what we could call the combat system. Now more elements are involved in the battle to have the suction cup, but it is the combos that give more depth to the task of reducing the life points of the ghosts. The combos, with which we can take up to four consecutive strokes, require the exact press of the action button when we see that the circle on the screen closes. It's all very fun, destructible, reactive.
We can deal up to four consecutive hits; We have to hit.
We asked Nintendo how many plants we could expect in total at the hotel, because it sinned to repeat the same setting in almost every corner. Although they did not know how to detail the exact number of what we could call worlds, they did tell us that what we could see in the E3 presentation videos was only the tip of the iceberg in quantity and variety of scenarios: a restaurant awaits us, a sort of Desert with pyramids, icy areas, gardens, Roman circuses …
Everything goes, because in the Mario universe everything goes. The challenge now lies in the design of the bosses, how the cooperative multiplayer takes advantage and those approaches to the competitive one, and if it stays as fresh, dynamic and precious as in this demonstration. We could not stop playing until the end, a symptomatic element of the addictive and immersive that can become if all the elements involved in the adventure are balanced.
Luigi's Mansion 3 points very high. On October 31 we can know whether or not it is one of the essentials of the catalog of the increasingly vitaminized Nintendo Switch.
