To start off the review, I'm going to say that if you haven't played the original Pac-Man Championship Edition DX +, you should not even consider this game until you've bought and played that game. It is a modern classic, and I find it hard to imagine anybody would enjoy this game more than the original. If you don't like the original, it’s unlikely you'll enjoy this game. Unfortunately, even if you love the first in the series, there's a good chance this game will disappoint you.
The basic premise of the game is similar to the original 80's Pac-Man: Eat everything you can while avoiding ghosts (until you gain the ability to eat them too). Championship Edition DX adds a fast-paced, electro-music, puzzle-game type of twist to the old formula.
This game comes with 2 basic modes: Score Attack and Adventure Mode. There's also a Tutorial Mode to introduce basic game concepts.
Score Attack has 10 different maps to choose from, mostly inspired by the previous game's boards, but also includes some new ones. As the name implies, the goal is to get the highest score possible by eating dots, fruits, power pellets, and ghosts within a 5 minute limit. Each map has 3 different difficulty levels to choose from, and your results are graded and tracked on a leaderboard so you can compare your score against others. Each map also has a 10-minute time limit version of the map, but this version is only for 'practice', and does not have a leaderboard associated with it. You end up with 30 trials to attempt to get 'S' rank on and rise to the top of each one's leaderboard.
Adventure Mode replaces the Time Trial mode of the previous game. This mode asks you to collect a certain amount fruit as quickly as possible. A countdown timer begins at the start of the level, and if it counts down to 0 before you've completed the objective then you fail and must restart. It features an 'overworld map' type of structure, where there are 10 or more sub-levels that must be completed before unlocking a boss-level. After the boss level is completed, the map moves on to the next section of 10+ levels (I use the word 'map' loosely, there is no story or additional graphics, it’s just a set of 10 squares labeled 1-1 through 1-10 to choose from, and a box labeled 'BOSS'). Each level also has 3 difficulty levels to choose from, which changes how much time is on the countdown timer at the start of each level. There are no leaderboards associated with this mode, and based on the game's Achievements there seems to be at least half a dozen sets of levels.
The problems come with how the actual gameplay differs from the original. The original game was simple enough to easily pick-up, and seemed to give you every advantage to avoid dying. This game seems to have added several unintuitive features that only serve to frustrate and block progress. Below are some examples:
- One of the best parts of the original game is that time would drastically slow down any time you were in danger of losing a life. This gave the player the option to almost always save themselves, even if they made a wrong turn or a ghost surprised them while travelling at top speed. In this game there is never any intentional slowdown. Instead, ghosts begin as harmless, and you will literally bounce off of them if you run into them. However, if you bounce into them enough times, they become 'angry', at which point touching them again results in death. So instead of a rewarding system that allows you to recover from mistakes, the game changed to make mistakes either meaningless or harshly punished.
- In the original game, bombs would send all active ghosts back to their central cell, guaranteeing your safety and allowing you to continue on your route. Thus, bombs were a limited item that could be used to continue progress no matter the situation. In this game, using a bomb teleports you back to your starting point in the map, next to a 'safe zone' where ghosts cannot harm you, stopping your progress and making it feel more like a retreat than an attack on the ghosts. Granted, there is some strategy to using this new bomb functionality, as it can allow you to clear levels faster by teleporting to the middle of the map from any location, but it still feels like a removal of one of the key powers of the game.
- The way power pellets work has been completely revamped. Now, once Pac-Man eats a Power Pellet, the ghost trains move very quickly at try to avoid Pac-Man by running through pre-defined paths on the map. After catching up with the head a ghost train, Pac-Man jumps above the map and enters an eating animation while the rest of the board continues to move at normal speed. On harder difficulties, where there can be 4 separate ghost trains, each of which needs to be consumed to continue on, this can lead to a significant amount of time being spent catching the ghost trains, watching the animation for eating it, figuring out where the other ghosts have moved while the animation played, and then repeating 3 more times. It turns what should be the most enjoyable part of Pac-Man (eating ghosts) into a frustrating experience.
- The addition of difficulty levels falls into the problem where the higher difficulty levels aren't necessarily harder, but just more annoying. At the hardest difficulty, the end-of-level fruits and power pellets will actively run away from Pac-Man, forcing you to chase after them while avoiding ghosts. The easiest difficulty only allows for 1 ghost train at a time (similar to the original), while harder ones enable up to 4 (which clutters up the map with ghost trains and makes eating every ghost a hassle as mentioned above).
- The Adventure Mode is a complete misfire. Rather than giving the player infinite time and challenging them to continue to improve on their fastest time, the imposition of arbitrary time limits as a fail condition is much worse. But even that's really beside the point, as without leaderboards attached to the mode there is little reason to slog through 60+ of these levels rather than simply getting better at the Score Attack modes.
- There are other examples (the speed multiplier from the original is gone, the addition of a 'brake' button implies the developers intend for Pac-Man to stop moving during the game as a strategy, 1-Ups have become a pickup item that appears randomly during levels, etc.), but in general almost every new or changed feature makes the game inferior to the original.
I'm a huge fan of the original Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (I have well over a hundred hours in it, getting into the top percentage of the leaderboards), and I keep wondering if my love of the original game is why I'm disappointed with this sequel ("could anything measure up?"). I appreciate that the developers had to make changes to the base gameplay in order to justify a sequel, but nearly every change they've made shows a misunderstanding of what made the original game so much fun. It's like a video game form of a bad movie remake: it doesn't do anything new that's worth doing, it doesn't seem to understand the appeal of its source material, and it likely wouldn't exist if the original hadn't been hugely successful and garnered such goodwill. Because of all this, I just can't recommend this game, even to diehard fans of the original.