PLATFORM: SWITCH | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Continuing their penchant for bringing classic games to the Switch, Nintendo’s latest updated blast from the past is Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD, originally released on the 3DS in 2013. Playing as Luigi, your job is to recover the pieces of the Dark Moon, a large crystal that has been shattered by King Boo, resulting in the ghosts of Evershade Valley becoming hostile. With his trusty Poltergust at his side and some extra assistance from the diminutive Professor, Luigi sets off to eliminate the ghosts, put the Dark Moon back together and restore peace once again.
To help make the leap from the 3DS’s two tiny screens to the Switch’s larger single screen, all of the game’s visuals have been remade in HD. Gone are the blocky jagged lines of the original, replaced with smoothly rounded edges and a satisfying level of polish and sheen that find the game comfortably sitting alongside any of Nintendo’s other recent releases. The gameplay hasn’t changed at all, but seeing as everything was A-OK on that side of things already there shouldn’t really be any complaints in that department. Exploring the mansions and solving the many puzzles that lie in wait is still as fun as it always was, with plenty of inventive traps and obstacles waiting to be overcome and countless secrets to be found.
Being eleven years old at this point, Luigi’s Mansion 2 of course doesn’t quite surpass the much more recent follow-up, but nevertheless it’s still a superb puzzler with plenty of Nintendo’s trademark adorably charming kooky (and, in this instance, spooky) characters. It could be argued that some additions to the gameplay might have been appreciated, and some of the dialogue could maybe have been updated here and there (slightly confusingly, there are occasional references to the 3DS’s dual screen which of course no longer comes into play in the Switch version), but other than that this is another excellent update of an old favourite that should help the game to find a new audience who weren’t around at the time of its original release.
