{"id":131,"date":"2026-01-05T15:04:22","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T15:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regame.news\/?p=131"},"modified":"2026-01-05T15:04:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T15:04:22","slug":"luigis-mansion-2-hd-review-weegee-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regame.news\/?p=131","title":{"rendered":"Luigi\u2019s Mansion 2 HD Review \u2013 Weegee Board"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As the Switch moves into the twilight years of an especially lengthy lifespan, Nintendo has increasingly turned toward remasters of its back catalog to fill out the release calendar. This is the context for Luigi\u2019s Mansion 2 HD, a remastered version of a relatively recent 2013 release on 3DS. The sequel is a game that served as a sharpened, refined take on the ideas presented by the first Luigi\u2019s Mansion\u2013and laid the groundwork for the even better Luigi\u2019s Mansion 3\u2013so having access to that piece of the series\u2019 history untethered from the 3DS makes it feel that much more valuable. While the recency makes it feel less essential than some remasters of older classics like Metroid Prime or Super Mario RPG, it\u2019s still just as fun to solve puzzles, schlurp ghosts into your jerry-rigged vacuum cleaner, and enjoy some gentle scares along the way.<\/p>\n

The original Luigi\u2019s Mansion was a cute diversion-verging-on-tech-demo that helped cement Luigi\u2019s personality as Mario\u2019s skittish and reluctantly heroic brother. Drafted against his will to catch a bunch of ghosts, it was a kid-friendly take on Resident Evil by way of Ghostbusters\u2013even down to the tank controls, puzzles, and interconnected mansion setting. Luigi\u2019s Mansion 2, by comparison, swaps out the single environment for a series of different buildings that all reside in one extremely haunted neighborhood called Evershade Valley. That gives the game a more disconnected, mission-based feeling than both its earlier and later entries, in exchange for environments that present very differently from each other and allow for the feeling of themed haunted houses: an ancient tomb, a creaky old snow lodge, and so on.<\/p>\n

The mission structure focused on single goals that take around 15-20 minutes to complete seems primed for portable play on 3DS\u2013the game\u2019s original platform\u2013and that gives Luigi\u2019s Mansion 2 a particular rhythm. It\u2019s easy to pick up and digest a stage or two at a time but harder to get lost in for long stretches of time without feeling like you\u2019re going through the same steps over and over. A typical mission has you exploring a particular section of the building you\u2019re investigating, usually needing to locate some MacGuffin to unlock a section, sucking up a few scattered ghosts, and taking part in at least one arena-style fight against several ghosts. Rinse, repeat.<\/p>\n

Luigi progressively gains access to three key pieces of equipment: the Poltergust, the Strobulb, and the Dark-Light Device. Nintendo games excel at filling their worlds with playful touches, and these tools are key to making the environment feel alive. Your Poltergust is mostly used for eliminating ghosts, but it can also suck up money, pull off fake wallpaper to reveal hidden passageways, spin fans, or impact the environment in a few other ways. The Strobulb stuns ghosts but also activates electronic buttons and switches. And the Dark-Light Device is mostly used to fish keys and other objects out of haunted paintings, but later is used for activities like tracking footprints from a ghostly \u201cPolterpup\u201d dog. Each of these pieces of gear also upgrades to be stronger and faster, but that progression is linear and you don\u2019t have any real control over which gear to prioritize. Still, as long as you\u2019re doing a little exploration you\u2019ll keep pace with the upgrades you need.<\/p>\n

The tank controls can take some getting used to, especially as ghosts circle around a corner and you need to rotate Luigi\u2019s body to point the Poltergust or Strobulb at them. The right stick controls the direction your tool is pointing, while the Poltergust, Strobulb, and Dark-Light Device are mapped to ZR, R, and L, respectively. You can freely point your tools with the right-stick, which makes the \u201clook up\u201d function of the X button an odd vestigial piece of the original 3DS controls. In addition to the standard tank controls, listed as Omnidirectional, there\u2019s a Horizontal option for movement that feels a little more natural, but it can still be difficult to get your bearings quickly.<\/p>\n

The 3DS origins have other odd holdovers as well. The overhead shots of each environment while selecting a mission look uniformly low-quality, which sticks out. Occasionally, objects will appear surprisingly jagged in ways that look unintentional despite the series\u2019 more spooky, angular aesthetic. Not all of the anachronistic artifacts are uninvited, though; Luigi communicates with a \u201cDual Scream\u201d device, which is clearly just a clunky old first-gen Nintendo DS. It was already a silly visual gag in the original, but this many years removed, it\u2019s downright nostalgic.<\/p>\n

Luigi\u2019s Mansion 2 HD also still showcases a sparkling sense of personality and humor, especially with Luigi\u2019s animations. It\u2019s clear he\u2019s been roped into this ghost-catching gig against his will, and he doesn\u2019t really want to do it, but Professor E. Gadd barrels through his apparent objections. The ghosts themselves are often funny, too, engaging in slapstick antics, especially when you spy on them through a peephole or a crack in the wall. At one point, I peeked into a room and laughed to find that I was peering over a ghost\u2019s shoulder as he hovered over a toilet reading a newspaper.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Professor E. Gadd, I really can\u2019t stand his design. This isn\u2019t the fault of Luigi\u2019s Mansion 2 HD specifically\u2013he looks largely the same as he did in the original and Luigi\u2019s Mansion 3. But it\u2019s just hard to look at a classic, iconic design like Luigi or a Boo next to this obnoxiously ugly design, which looks like a mad scientist crossed with a baby. Nintendo seems unfortunately married to E. Gadd as the impetus for Luigi\u2019s ghostly adventures, but that character\u2019s look has aged terribly.<\/p>\n

The vast majority of Luigi\u2019s Mansion 2 is fairly simple, with a good sense of pacing between solving basic puzzles and catching a few ghosts. I would only occasionally feel stumped when a puzzle solution wasn\u2019t apparent, but the game is usually reliable about at least pointing you in the right direction of which room you should be exploring next.<\/p>\n

Despite that, though, the combat difficulty ramps up severely at the end, especially in one particular stage that is a long gauntlet of enemy encounters. The combination of ghosts who are shielded against you in various ways, and others that surprise you and temporarily remove control, makes it much harder to manage. At this point more than any other, I keenly felt the lack of checkpoints. Since Luigi\u2019s Mansion 2 is designed around quick, digestible missions, checkpoints are basically non-existent\u2013if you fail out a mission, you simply restart it from the beginning. Most of the time this is fine, but it feels much\u00a0less<\/em>\u00a0fine when you\u2019re 95% done with a late-game mission and then fail out and need to start all over again.<\/p>\n

Like the 3DS version, the single-player campaign is augmented by the multiplayer Scarescraper mode, a series of randomized challenges that can be played through the Switch Online service. Up to four players can explore the map together from a handful of modes. Hunter Mode has you trying to eliminate a series of ghosts, for example, while Polterpup Mode has you tracking the pawprints of a roaming Polterpup to proceed.<\/p>\n

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Luigi explores a spooky haunted house in Luigi\u2019s Mansion 2 HD<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Despite being created for multiplayer, though, most of the time your best bet is splitting up and covering different rooms separately, so it doesn\u2019t feel all that different than a regular play session\u2013just with randomized rooms that fit together like Lego pieces. Teamwork and coordination are a must for the post-match challenge, though, as Red Coins get scattered throughout the map and the timer is way too short to reasonably get them all yourself. Gathering all the Red Coins gets your team a post-stage bonus, so if you want to maximize your ghost-hunting abilities, the divide-and-conquer approach is essential. The power-ups are randomly doled out to a single player at a time, though, so one player may get better gear than the rest, and there doesn\u2019t appear to be any catch-up mechanism for players who miss out.<\/p>\n

You can take on these challenges in multiples of five, up to 25 stages at a time, and then completing those will unlock Endless mode. You could technically complete these missions with only one player, but it would be much harder and you almost certainly would miss out on power-ups, so it would probably get unreasonably difficult very fast. You can also take the coins earned in Scarescraper back into the single-player mode for upgrades. However, in a limited play session, I only earned 50 gold for a five-floor challenge, regardless of how much loot I actually collected. Given that the higher-end single-player upgrades end up costing tens of thousands of coins, you can\u2019t realistically expect to grind them out with the multiplayer mode. So the Scarescraper exists mostly just to have fun with your friends, not to make real game progression. To that end, it\u2019s low-impact and breezy, but unlikely to last more than a few play sessions.<\/p>\n

Luigi\u2019s Mansion: Dark Moon on 3DS was a surprising revival for an unconventional game. Now that we\u2019ve had Luigi\u2019s Mansion 3, the series has come more into its own, and the second game is neither the trailblazer nor the refined third entry. That makes Luigi\u2019s Mansion 2 HD an oddball\u2013less essential than some other Switch remakes, but an interesting middle step in the development of Luigi\u2019s puzzle series, with its own charms and place in the series history.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the Switch moves into the twilight years of an especially lengthy lifespan, Nintendo has increasingly turned toward remasters of its back catalog to fill out the release calendar. This is the context for Luigi\u2019s Mansion 2 HD, a remastered version of a relatively recent 2013 release on 3DS. The sequel is a game that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regame.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regame.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regame.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regame.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regame.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/regame.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":136,"href":"https:\/\/regame.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions\/136"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regame.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regame.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regame.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regame.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}