Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon

I bought Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon a couple weeks ago when it was on sale at Future Shop for $29.99.

It's a slow-paced puzzle adventure with incredibly poor, clunky controls. But the graphics and production values are fairly good.

What kills this game is when you need to suck up the ghosts, the controls are not good, but the worst is that when you activate the vacuum or flashlight, you can only point it in one direction. If you want to move your beam you need to turn it off and change the way you're facing and turn it on again... It's not very responsive because Luigi is way more sluggish than the ghosts he has to defeat. So it makes combat a real chore... in fact the controls are quite awful and wreck what could have been a better game.

The pacing is slow, because it's like a point and click... only you don't have a mouse control so you have to walk up to everything and suck/shine your blacklight on it, or press X. It makes for some pretty tedious gameplay when it should be fun.

Originally this game was going to be called Luigi's Mansion 2, and it references the first Gamecube game quite a bit. As soon as you're dropped into the story it expects you've played the Gamecube game... WTF?? That might have been ok if they made the GC game available on Wii/Wii U as a download, but most people can't find it or if they only have a Wii U or Wii Mini, can't even play Gamecube games.

Unfortunately like the Mario games, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon looks good, but I don't know if it is actually much fun to play.

The sluggish controls ruin this game. Nintendo and developer Next Level Games, you should be ashamed for putting out such a sub-standard product.


Later
Don