Game:

Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures (2013)

Duration: 5:55:41

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This game started out terrible but ended up not being that bad in the end. World 1 levels are REALLY bad. First complaint is that this game hardly has it's own metrics figured out, being visually misleading as Pac-Man should clearly be able to access parts of levels that have invisible walls in front of them. But that mostly only an issue in the levels that take place in a city. Pretty bad for any game, but especially bad for a 3D platformer. This game crashed on me two times (black screen of death) and got stuck once sliding down forever (but I could still exit the level thankfully).

Compared to the Pac-Man World games, they've greatly reduced Pac-Man's abilities in base form. He can no longer butt bounce or roll, or even hang onto ledges. The game makes you get specific abilities to due basic stuff, like swinging, rolling, bouncing, wall-jump etc: he really shouldn't need special abilities to do any of these things. And this game treats Pac-Man like Kirby for some reason, get hit once and you lose the ability. I thought these abilities would make the game really bad since in World 1 they are used rather pointlessly, but are used more interestingly in later levels.

There are hardly any enemy types in this game, just the same ghosts that you need to chomp but you are probably better off ignoring them unless the game makes you eat them to progress. There's some padding with forcing you to collect enough Pac Dots to access certain levels which is too bad. The reward for completion seems to be unlocking garbage arcade minigames. This game is very underwhelming but levels get better later on, still not worthwhile overall.

I was very confused starting out because if this was developed by Namco it's very poor quality for them, but turns out it's Monkey Bar Games who seemed to make shitty licensed games and went bankrupt after the sequel to this game. Which by the way, I've played the sequel before and it's basically the exact same thing as this game, same abilities level themes etc. I even ordered this game, the case said Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures, opened it up and it's the disc of the second game... so even the person who sold it (the case only that is) to me thinks it's the same game. Clearly Namco wanted the Ghostly Adventures franchise to revive the Pac-Man brand, even having a 52-episode anime to go along with the games, but Namco now wants you to forget this exists as they've delisted the game. This game kept having dialogue saying "It's Pac-Man!" or "I'm Pac-Man" but not even Namco is convinced. Anyway, the 3DS games apparently were developed by Inti Creates, so I'm actually looking forward to playing those.

Personal rating: 2 / 5 (Mediocre) -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/brickngames