Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures 2 Review: A video game icon left in the gutter

Pac-Man is a cornerstone of gaming history, up there with the likes of Sonic, Mario, Lara Croft and the paddles from Pong for services to the industry. But, just like a certain blue spiny mammal‘s career, which goes down the toilet near-on everytime he leaves his 2D comfort zone, so too does that of the iconic yellow chap.

Granted, there’s not been much to shout about on the Pac-Man front for years in any dimension, barring the rather decent Championship Edition DX of course, but Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures 2 is as embarrassing an entry on his C.V. as you would dare to dream of.

Pac-Man once again finds himself poured into another late 90’s 3D platforming template in the sequel to a game based on the abhorrent Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures T.V. show (I’ll skip past why it’s so bad, just watch five minutes of it sometime and you’ll see). The latter part of the equation is a huge contributor to what TGA 2 does so wrong, but it doesn’t help that the gameplay is persistently haunted by platforming flaws of yesteryear either.

After being introduced to the story in an opening tutorial mission (bad guy ghost has an evil plan, only Pac-Man can stop him) you find yourself in a hub world that ties the various themed stages together. No points for guessing that there are lava, ice and water levels amongst them as TGA 2 deals in genre tropes and cliches almost exclusively in all departments. The overall look may be taken from the execrable telly show, but it also leans heavily on the stylings of Ratchet & Clank, a futuristic tube-fest with giant buttons, power specific switches and a risible attempt to copy the humour.

There are slivers of hope that Namco has tried to do something a little differently, the power-ups for example, include those hot and cold cliches, but also extend to the slightly less lazy powers of magnetism, chameleon tongue and being a boulder. These skills add some variety to the throwback platforming. Then there is a fairly token effort to inject some variety into the pacing by chucking in some on-rails sections and some Godzilla-esque boss fights. There are also some nice little homages to the series’ history, but given the intended audience is children, they are largely going to go unnoticed. To be frank, I could forgive all that genre-based laziness if TGA 2 handled anywhere close to a half-decent standard. It’s a shame then, that it mostly controls like a drunk rhino on rollerskates.

The camera for instance, is fixed, meaning jumping anywhere that isn’t in a straight line is immediately more difficult than it needs to be, but then the actual act of jumping is so vague with its accuracy to begin with that you can miss simple platform-to-platform move through no fault of your own. The attack/special buttons meanwhile, vary wildly between super-responsive and waiting an eternity for your input to register. One moment you are munching on Ghost after Ghost with ease, then suddenly, you veer off course and get hit simply because the game says so. All in all, this just adds an irritating artificial challenge to any attempt at getting gold medal scores on each level as otherwise you’d sail through.

As if to compensate somewhat for these mechanical foibles, Namco has been super generous with extra lives. I probably lost around eight lives as a result of personal and game-related errors in the opening set of levels, but I still managed to accumulate 57 extra ones on top. Considering the medal system already in place, I would question the need for having lives at all, especially when it’s rendered meaningless via that generosity overkill.

With all that to contend with, TGA 2 could also have done with being a bit shorter. One or two larger sections per world would have at least lit the pilot light of interest to get you past the many issues already present, rather than forcing you to play through ten or so repetitive chunks of the same backgrounds with a weak boss fight thrown in at the end.

Somewhere, deep in the bowels of TGA 2’s code, is a passable kid-friendly platformer, one that doesn’t offend with its innate blandness. The reason that is so deeply buried is entirely down to the mountain of refuse tipped on top of it. Be it the basic design and mechanical flaws, the rank-tastic source material or just that it’ll drag like a dog with an itchy behind for anyone over the age of six, there are simply too many things that are broken or just do not work.

Score

4

The Final Word

Pac-Man needs to go back to his maze-running roots if he is to have a chance of starring in a decent game again, because efforts like this come across like a fading actor phoning it in on an awful movie for the sake of another paycheque.