Hotel Transylvania 3 Monsters Overboard Review

"Meh Vacation"

Campaign

Hotel Transylvania 3 Monsters Overboard is an interesting take on the movie tie-in providing a Pikmin-like experience. Here you play as either Drac or Mavis which can then control a variety of smaller monsters. These critters are unlocked by saving other monsters that have been sent off into the local island by a storm. It's a weird setup as you're time restricted in daily segments so you'll have to redo things if you don't reach certain points which can be annoying.

I also found some of the areas overly complex as you'd run out of bidding creatures and have to restart the day. There's some decent gameplay here and the first bit is actually not bad. I was surprised by the different sort of setup involved with this and it had its moments. That being said, some elements were rather simple and it didn't provide enough variation. It was the same sort of puzzles and monster setups with a system that purposely slowed gameplay down. Those looking for more can find collectibles which may require back tracking.

Gameplay

The visuals were alright though nothing too spectacular. They presented the movie well in terms of capturing the characters and many favorites were present. The beach setups were alright, yet somewhat bland in comparison to possibly being colorful due to the location. The mechanics were fine, but this might be slightly difficult for the younger audience. It's more strategy and puzzle oriented as opposed to telling a cohesive narrative. The story isn't presented in the most straight forward of ways mostly being little bits of dialogue.

The Conclusion

Hotel Transylvania 3 Monsters Overboard had potential, but didn't quite deliver being almost at a point of decency. I liked the Pikmin style and was purely surprised by it when I went to play. It was decent for quite awhile and then began to get awkward in terms of mechanics with the allotted time system really dragging things down.

There's a good selection of creatures to control and those mechanics were handled fine. It could be extremely frustrating to lose them however or have to restart with a small quantity after a day. It was a very limiting quality of the game that basically shut down progression making this come across as a grind. The characters from the movie are presented fine and it tried something new, but sabotaged itself.

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Hotel Transylvania 3 Monster Overboard Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by Clevercomm

Rating Overall: 5.4