Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard Review - Difficult to Find a Worse Game

Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard is a game, and that should be the extent of the description. It’s neither here or there, and it exists only to “complete” the experience provided by the latest animation movie called Hotel Transylvania 3.

Games built to take advantage of a movie that just arrived in theaters are rarely good. They don’t offer anything extra as the game developers are seldom in direct contact with the people working on the film. At best, they are given some general directions, but that’s pretty much about it.

Studios that make this sort of tie-ins don’t devote a lot of time and resources because they usually know ahead of time that it’s not something worth pursuing. Unless it’s a really big budget movie, games such as Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard has almost zero chances of succeeding.

In fact, it’s most likely something called a cash-grab, meaning that it tries to capitalize on something more well-known, swindling a few people to buy the game as well. It’s unclear just how profitable these games really are, but they must make some money because studios continue to churn them out.

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I could find no reason why Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard should exist other than to trick a few people that went to the movies, and liked what they saw, into buying a product that would offer the same kind of experience.

A similar situation is common with blockbuster movies. Let’s say that Independence Day is about to come out, and online a film called Independence War Day shows up available in HD quality before the launch. A few people will be conned into thinking that the movie that’s now running in theaters is also available in on Bluray already. If enough people fall for it, Independence War Day will make some money.

Story and gameplay

Unless you’re familiar with the characters in Hotel Transylvania 3 or any of the previous films, the story or what’s left of it won’t stick. There is no kind of backbone to the game that allows people that are not familiar with the subject to understand what’s going on. Fortunately, the story itself is really thin and more centered on the puzzle aspect. Even if you don’t know who the characters are, it doesn’t matter in the long run.

The team you came to know from Hotel Transylvania are marooned on an island, and they need to figure out how to save themselves. The biggest problem is that some of the other people and monsters are missing. Also, an important compass was broken in several pieces and landed in various parts of the map, making their departure impossible.

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Players will be able to control one of the two characters, Dracula or Mavis. Their job is to find where everyone is, save them, and to retrieve the compass. And that’s pretty much it.

In terms of gameplay, seasoned players will discover that Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard is actually a pretty rough copy of Overlord (I and II). It’s not even a good copy because it’s clear that it’s a low budget game. In fact, it’s as low as possible. And the concept itself is poorly implemented, which means that more development time wouldn’t have helped at all.

If you don’t already know about the Overlord game, then playing Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard will most likely give you a wrong impression. Just like in the game that’s copied from, players control their avatar from a third-person perspective, which can command a number of smaller creatures that also have various powers.

For example, the Impas, as the creatures are called, are separated into various categories, each with its strength and weaknesses. The ones that you start with can fight, retrieve objects, and move heavy things. On the other hand, they can’t do anything else, even if it might seem that they should be able to.

Other Impas can chew through objects and fight as well, but they are weirdly and fatally attracted by weird smells. You get the gist. The player only has a limited number of creatures that they can call upon and use at the same time.

The Impas can be called upon from some portals in the ground, which also act as a sort of checkpoints. The problem is that these checkpoints are really far apart, and the player often has to return with various objects to them. Now, if you’re ripping off another game, why not copy the good ideas as well? In Overlord, you collect what the creatures are bringing back, with very few exceptions. The only reason why this is not happening in Hotel Transylvania 3 is that they had to make the game longer artificially.

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To make matters worse, players only have ten minutes to explore the map before the sun rises. Let’s not forget that Dracula is a vampire, and he needs to hide. But, since there is no penalty for staying until the end of the night, and no benefit in returning to the ship, this artificial time limit doesn’t make any sense.

And, if you take into consideration that you’re going to run around bringing stuff back to checkpoints, more than anything else, the ten minutes exploration period becomes annoying, to say the least.

This takes us to the control scheme, which is rather simple. You send the creatures to the enemy or object, and they do their job. But the AI Is really bad, and they don’t return. You have to call them back, but you have to manually aim at the Impas you need to return. It’s tiresome, and they don’t even respond half the time.

Impas also don’t have any kind of pathfinding skills, which means that if you call them from around a bend in the road, they are very likely to become stuck in some texture, somewhere along the way. And it happens all the freaking time.

Graphics and sound

Any player that started any other game on PlayStation 4 will notice that it’s a budget title, and by that, I mean that they didn’t have a budget for the graphics department. It’s as bland as you can imagine or worse. The animations are terrible, and the effects are practically non-existent.

As for sounds and music, you can forget about them. Most of the story is offered in text form, during the breaks on the ship and after finishing some of the quests. There is nothing else of importance in this department.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion