Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard

My expectations walking into a 2018 movie tie-in for a kids' animated franchise were low enough that almost anything playable would have felt like a win. What I found was a stripped-down Pikmin-style game that, against the odds, has a legitimate gameplay loop underneath its licensed coating. You pick between Dracula or Mavis and command groups of small creatures called Impa - little minions you dispatch to fight enemies, haul objects, and unlock new paths. As you progress across three island environments, you unlock new Impa variants like the Frankenimpa and Wolfimpa, each with distinct abilities that gate access to different areas. That light Metroidvania structure, where revisiting earlier islands with newly unlocked Impa types reveals hidden treasures and collectibles, gives the game more mechanical texture than you'd expect from this genre of release. The core design borrows heavily from Nintendo's Pikmin, right down to the day-cycle system that forces you to make the most of your time on each island before returning to a hub. That time pressure works reasonably well in small doses, though it can turn frustrating if you've run your Impa count too low and need to end the day early to recover. Boss fights are present across the three islands and start interesting enough, but they get progressively easier rather than harder, which is the opposite of what you want. The PC version carries an additional headache: a confirmed bug where accessing certain treasure menus with only a controller attached can lock the game and force an alt-F4 restart. It's the kind of rough edge that tells you post-launch support wasn't exactly a priority. On the presentation side, the game is visibly low budget. Textures are flat, animations are stiff, and the voice cast is clearly not the film's actual actors - though a few of the stand-ins do a serviceable job. The character dialogue loops repeat aggressively, which is fine for five minutes and grating after an hour. Adults will feel that friction much faster than kids will. The total runtime lands around four hours for the main story, with some bonus time for completionists chasing all the treasure collectibles. For a short afternoon with a younger sibling or child who loves the franchise, that length fits. For a solo adult playthrough expecting depth, it doesn't. Where the game genuinely earns credit is in its structure. Torus Games could have made a flat brawler or a linear collect-a-thon and called it done. Instead they built something with real traversal gating, enemy variety including giant crabs, carnivorous flowers, and ire lizards, and a loop that keeps each session feeling purposeful. It's not a deep game, but the mechanics function and the Impa command system is intuitive enough to work for younger players. The Steam review score sitting at Mixed with 59% positive is fair - this is a game that lands differently depending entirely on who is sitting in the chair.

Alex · Scout Team

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