Review for Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard. Game for Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 10/07/2018
Hotel Transylvania 3 Monsters Overboard is one of those cases in which the phrase "shoot the Red Cross" in reference to the review of a tie-in video game not only is it apt, but even reductive: the game in question shows the same contempt for the danger of a naked man, covered in honey and candied fruit, throwing himself into an angel's flight and with a broad smile on an Australian termite mound after a long, very cold winter.
If it is possible to find justifications and mitigations for the insane act of suicide, it is more complicated to have the same understanding for an economic and marketable good, the result of the collective effort of several lucid minds and dependent on someone, whose work is (supposedly) subjected to tests and quality controls that perhaps does not elevate the original work from which the offending tie-in derives, but at least tries not to offend it.
Hotel Transylvania 3 Monsters Overboard arises as direct follow-up to the events narrated in Adam Sandler's third animated film; the feature film has received conflicting opinions and not too successful at the box office, with most of the criticisms focused on the unconvincing plot and an excessive fanservice of jokes and situations that stink of already seen and dangerously approach the brand to a level more of a cinepanettone than a brilliant and sparkling comedy for the whole family.
So you don't need any particular mischief in the marketing sector to realize how Hotel Transylvania 3 Monsters overboard was the last nail in the coffin that poor Dracula would ever have hoped to receive: original voice actors from the film, some catchy musical themes and discreetly crafted and animated polygonal models of the main characters, especially given the multi-platform (and therefore poorly optimized) nature of the title.
Other than that, Hotel Transylvania 3 Monsters overboard is simply unsavable from every point of view. Both the rating and the tie-in nature suggest that the target the game is aiming for is a rather young audience and therefore one cannot expect extremely complex or innovative game mechanics; There's nothing wrong with taking a compelling format and reusing it under another label, but what Hotel Transylvania 3 just does is recycle the format from strategy in real time, typical of other and much better titles like Pikmin, emptying it of all depth and fun.
- IMPA, this is the name of the minions that the player will command, they have different abilities based on their type, but they share a characteristic, in turn common to the level design and the appearance of the enemies and bosses of the game: they are horrible to see.
In fact, excluding the aesthetics of the characters in the feature film, both the creatures and the settings of Hotel Transylvania 3 Monsters in the Sea are banal, bastard children of a listless artistic hand, without character, without even those bright colors that could attract the attention of the younger audience.
The islands to explore are winding corridors with just a few crossroads and widening, unnecessarily twisted, without a map or mini-map to support all the unfortunate buyers of the game, missing any element to make them pleasing to the eye or at least identifiable as part of the world of Hotel Transylvania and with the aggravating circumstance of very low resolution textures and polygonal density to be the envy of software two generations behind videogames compared to today.
The attempt to "lengthen the broth" of a soup without seasoning can be perceived as much by the structure of the levels, which include zigzag roads completely free of interaction or enemies, as well as in the annoying timer that marks the "nights" available to continue the 'adventure. While there is no real time limit, which once reached leads to game over, the player has only ten minutes at a time to explore the map before the sun rises.
Not completing a mission by the deadline forces you to restart from the last checkpoint, without any real penalty a real waste of time in real life, an avoidable loading and a lot, too much frustration: in the absence of an in-game map, an online guide or infinite patience, in fact, it will be inevitable to get lost in the corridors all the same, full of enemies all the same and, if already a seasoned player finds obvious problems in orientation, a very young or with little experience in the field of videogames will give up after a few hours to learn a similar tarantella of trial and error, without prizes or punishments and overflowing with pure and simple lack of ideas.
As if all this were not enough, the multi-platform nature of Hotel Transylvania 3 Monsters at Sea also undermines its optimization in the command binding: already the genre of the game is ill suited to inputs tied to a generic controller, but if you add theirs poor reactivity (in spite of unexpectedly hostile obstacles and creatures for a PEGI 7) the impulse of ragequit will insinuate itself inexorably even in the most placid souls.
Hotel Transylvania 3 Monsters in the Sea is the quintessence of the tie-in that the gaming market should abhor: a soulless and heartless creature that copies (badly) successful formats, without providing a valid backbone with the slightest original support in design, balancing and general optimization. It is a purely commercial product, sold at a ridiculously high figure for what it offers (which is much less than many free to play smartphones) and whose purchase cannot be recommended either to fans of animation products or to those who want a first approach to the world of video games with something light, easy and colorful.
► Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters at Sea is an Arcade-Adventure-RPG type game developed by Torus Games and published by Bandai Namco for Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 10/07/2018
