Welcome to our review of Hotel Transylvania 3 on Nintendo Switch, a game inspired by the movie and it plays like one very specific Nintendo game…
Dracula, Mavis and the gang have been marooned on the mysterious Lost Islands!
Only you, with help from lovable little creatures, the Impa, can reunite them with the rest of the Drac-Pack! Lead your Impa team on daring missions to explore the Lost Islands and rescue Frankenstein, Murray and Wayne. Discover new Impa varieties – including Frankenimpa, Wolfimpa and more – and use their scary skills to battle fearsome enemies, solve puzzles and save your monster friends, in a hilarious new adventure that continues the story of Sony Pictures Animation’s Hotel Transylvania 3 movie!
For this review, we will be playing a game, guess who knows what other game this was inspired by. First off, the gameplay.
In the game, you play as Drac or Mavis and you are stranded on a mysterious islands. You have these helper creatures named the Impa at your disposal and you basically boss them around to do your handiwork. Sounds familiar yet?
As you progress, you get to take gems and turn those into more Impa so you can reach further and do more. Even can use them to attack the enemies. Enemies which at times are too powerful and you need to really throw every single one at them and hope they all survive.
All while you only have a certain part of the day to perform all your actions and discover the island, considering we are talking about monsters and vampires, … This is obvious when it is night, but in true cartoon style, it is clearly visible at night….
If this still does not ring a bell, let me give you a big clue. It is a clone of one of the games that is supposedly done. You know, Pikmin.
Hotel Transylvania is the next best thing to getting an original Pikmin and will do a decent enough job to haul you over till Nintendo finally drops this one. It is in pure cartoon style and action adventure, so you know what to expect. The characters may look a little too small in handheld mode, but they look totally fine on a TV.
It plays and feels like Pikmin in a way, but it is not Pikmin as it is missing that breeze of exploring the wilderness. Despite really trying, Hotel Transylvania 3 suffers from the clone bug and you will always keep thinking the original is better. They really try to make it fun and as a fan of the movies, I did enjoy it more than I would like to admit.
But as a reviewer, you need to at least try to take out the personal aspect and well, the mechanics are easy to learn for HT3 and before you know it, you are building, moving, attacking, … It is fun, but it is not great fun. It is more like a great attempt at cloning a game without actually succeeding if that makes sense?
In conclusion, this game gets a thumbs up for effort. Bringing the Pikmin gameplay to a franchise game, it is a bold move. It didn’t fully succeed, but it does get points for trying. I just missed that real nostalgic feeling of moving Olimar around. Mavis or Drac are just not “it”.
