The Haunted Hoard: Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard (Switch)

Unless a film has a direct video game genre analogue like a racing game or shooter, it’s a pretty safe bet to assume any movie adaptation is going to be made into an action platformer. However, with the decline of tie-in games for major motion pictures, these became a rarer breed, but a breed even rarer is a movie game that comes out in 2018 and goes for an entirely unexpected gene. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation was not a film that seemed like ripe material for a video game, but one was made anyway and released for the major consoles of the time, and perhaps more surprising than it existing at all is the fact its gameplay seems to be based around the minion management featured in games like Pikmin.

Told as a side story to the film’s plot, Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard has Dracula, his family, and his amicable monster friends aboard a cruise ship. Before the fun can start though they are quickly knocked overboard by a freak storm, finding themselves washed up on a set of three islands. With the ship captain’s compass shattered into three pieces there’s no hope of escaping the islands safely, so Dracula and his daughter Mavis set off to find the missing monsters and retrieve these pieces to get back to their cruise. The two vampires quickly run into some unexpected help on the islands though as they prove to be the home of a race of small creatures known as Impas. The tiny creatures are not only skilled in fighting off local fauna and performing hard labor, but they can also take on new forms if they observe the right inspiration, Dracula and Mavis cultivating these little imps so they can have the workforce needed to overcome the trials ahead of them.

Other than your taste in the small pool of voice lines you’ll be hearing repeatedly, it doesn’t matter whether you pick Dracula or Mavis when you begin exploring an island. What’s more important are the type of Impas you have and the number you bring with you. Impas can only be called out or put away at special dens scattered across the islands, but more can be made by finding gems known as Imparite. You can only have a small selection of Impas out at one time, but you can have out up to four varieties, their abilities based on the monster friends you encounter across the islands. Your starting Impas mimic the vampire duo and gain the ability to fly over gaps, the imps that copy the beleaguered father and werewolf Wayne gain the ability to dig, the friendly Frankenstein gives the Impas the idea to assume tougher forms, and the eccentric mummy Murray inspires some Impas to put on wrappings and form bridges of sand. The sand bridges can sometimes confuse other Impas unfortunately and the werewolf Impas can be lured to their doom by strong scents, but you can easily set minions aside, command a certain type of Impa only, or even just go back to a den and change out the type of Impas with you with no limitation on what type they must be.

The different Impas are all used to get around specific obstacles on the three islands, albeit ones that are often very simplistic and don’t require much thought once you come across them. At best you might encounter a dirt wall the werewolf imps need to break through but the smells of flowers in the area must be dealt with by other Impas first, but for the most part if you see the designated object an Impa is built to deal with, the extent of the puzzle is having the right amount with you to perform the expected task. All Impas share a few abilities though, like being able to dogpile enemies to deal damage and carry objects of importance like bridge pieces provided there are enough Impas around to handle the weight. Item collection is rarely a challenge though, often just split up a bit so you have to use a specific Impa to reach a bridge piece, werewolf pup, or one of Frankenstein’s lost body parts, so it’s easy to see fairly quickly that the game is just recycling objective structures while also not pushing too hard in what it asks out of you. Likely this is the game trying to both imitate Pikmin’s gameplay style with ordering minions to work and fight in your stead but with more forgiving game design suitable for young players, but it still feels a lot of the tasks before you are chores rather than interesting tests of how you handle the Impas.

One of the clearest points of turning the difficulty way down is when you fight the game’s first boss, the plant monster strong enough to kill your Impas but the game constantly providing replacement ones so that the fight is never truly unwinnable. The last boss fight in the game on island three at least requires some figuring out as does the somewhat more involved puzzles found on that final island, but most of the more challenging moments won’t come from the required parts of the adventure. Most enemy battles are with something like the coconut crabs you see over and over again, the fight boiling down to sending in all the Impas and then calling them back when the crab is about to attack, the mere act of calling them giving brief invincibility. The bosses at least have a small gimmick to overcome, but it’s the treasure chests that usually ask for a bit more smarts in how you use your little followers. These are still simple in concept, like sending Impas into an open clam to snag the chest before it closes or figuring out how to place Impas on a switch to change a maze layout to reach the chest, but the rewards are often worth the small amount of thought and challenge needed to grab them. These chests contain upgrades like strengthening certain Impa types, allowing you to have more Impas in the field, or perhaps most convenient of all: lengthening the nights.

For practically no reason, each time you set out in Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard, you’re on a timer. While it makes sense the two vampires can only spend night time on the tropical islands, nights here last around six minutes and without upgrades, this timer will definitely be felt as it cuts your work days short over and over. There’s no real penalty for still being walking around with Impas when time is up for the night, and enemies you killed remain gone and any jobs you completed will remain in that state as well. It’s likely trying to copy Pikmin’s day system but doesn’t realize that Pikmin used it to both apply pressure on the whole and encouraged certain strategies for exploring its often open environments where many goals could be worked towards. Each of the three islands in Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard progresses in a linear fashion, some branches existing for treasures but most of your time will be spent locked out of moving forward until you perform the small set of nearby tasks. The night cycle just interrupts the process, kicking you back to the menu where there’s not much to do but plunge back in. There are already moments in the story like when you save a monster friend where you go back to that menu anyway and the player always has the option to end the night prematurely too, so why the game has to pull you out of its already slow and repetitive gameplay to add some more tedium on top really feels like a shortsighted choice that was only done to help with its attempt to copy its inspiration.

THE VERDICT: Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard attempts to be creative despite its status as a licensed game for a comedy film, but merely copying the genre trappings of Pikmin doesn’t make it as good as Pikmin. The Impas you command to do tasks and fight creatures may have a few unique abilities, but the tasks they perform are repeated without much alteration and rarely require any creativity to complete. Certain moments near the end and in optional side areas do at least require a little thought with how you use your minions, but for the most part you’re performing bland chores that are frequently interrupted by the night ending just so that things take a little longer to complete despite them requiring little thought or strategy.

And so, I give Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard for Nintendo Switch…

A BAD rating. Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard may have bucked the tendency for movie games to be action platformers, but its attempt to explore a less-traveled genre lead to it including parts of a successful game without evaluating why they worked in that title. It does feel like some aspects of the design do stem from the fact it is adapting an animated film and thus the developers don’t want to lose a younger audience, so allowances like Impas being invincible briefly when you call them away from combat aren’t the real issue here. Instead, it’s that the tasks those loyal imps perform are rarely demand more than moving the right type to the right place or swarming any type onto an enemy or item. The fact the game does concoct a few little puzzles of mild substance means it shows a small amount of promise, but too much of the game will be going up against a surprisingly small pool of enemies and obstacles as you progress through the three islands. Bosses actually show the kind of ideas that maybe could have been applied to regular enemies instead. The crab boss can’t be hurt until you’ve stunned it properly and the final boss has a fire breath attack that can’t be adequately shielded with the brief invincibility, and if a few more enemies packed such aspects or puzzles demanded at least the same level of thought to overcome as those boss designs, this game would have at least been serviceable. The nights ending would still be a nuisance and Impas should really find more purposes than being the metaphorical key to the same repeated locks, but if the game stimulated your brain at least a little between such problems, at least the game would be far less dull.

While I can appreciate the development team trying to avoid the same pitfalls most movie games fall into with their generic designs, poorly imitating Pikmin sadly wasn’t the way to make Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard more than another weak movie game. It does stand out a little compared to the crowd and for that very reason I was interested in playing it, but it doesn’t have a handle of what makes minion commanding an appealing gameplay type, and by porting over gameplay ideas without giving them a good environment to play in, Dracula and Mavis’s cruise wasn’t only interrupted by catastrophe, but by boring busywork that struggles to keep the player onboard.