I had such high hopes for Pac-Man: Championship Edition 2 (PMCE2). I didn't get into the original version, but I fell really hard for Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX (PCMEDX) a few years back, racking up all the achievements and posting some decent high scores among my friends list. It's a fantastic distillation of the things we love about Pac-Man and turn it just slightly on its head enough to make it amazingly fun. PMCE2... well... it doesn't.
The ghosts have gone from a threat to an annoyance. They will not kill our yellow, disc shaped hero unless he bumps them three times, but only the four lead ghosts. In the first mode you unlock, there are outline ghosts of the other three leads (Blinky the red ghost is the only "real" ghost here), and they just exist to get in your way and slow you down slightly. They never get mad, so they cannot kill you, so they are never a threat. They're just kind of... there.
The real stumbling block here is the new ghost chain system. Having a long line of ghosts follow you in PCMEDX that you built up to max before turning around and slaughtering was amazing. This time, the little green ghosts you wake up follow Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde around until you eat enough dots on the right maze to create a power pellet. Upon eating the pellet, you can eat one of the four lead ghosts and Pac-Man will enter a cut-scene like animation where he automatically consume their chain. Automatically. WHY?!
Part of the joy of PCMEDX was the satisfaction of munching each and every one of those purple bastards, but knowing you had to focus and follow the chain so they didn't get away from you. Now it's a canned animation. And sometimes you'll start an animation, another lead will come at you in its vulnerable, purple state, and (because you're locked in a canned animation) will pass right through you, unharmed. Oh, and if you try to eat any of the ghosts in the chain rather than one of the four leads, you bounce off. That's right. You can eat a power pellet, in a game called Pac-Man, and there are some ghosts that cannot be eaten in this state. It just feels so wrong.
There's an adventure mode, but it's nothing to write home about. There are challenges involving eating fruit quickly so you get to the next maze before time runs out, which requires you to not eat every dot, but just enough to get the fruit to appear. This is another aspect of the game that bothers me. Eating dots just fills a meter that makes the next object appear, be it fruit, power pellet, or semi-sentient power pellet that will run away from you just slowly enough for you to catch it, but just quickly enough to be annoying as hell. Eating every dot in every maze is another of the central tenants of Pac-Man and doing so here makes you feel like you're playing it wrong. You get extra bombs for doing so, but those are really used to just boost your score at the end of the game. I barely use them since the ghosts really pose no danger to Pac-Man.
They had a shot, a really good shot, of making this game damned good and another scoreboard chasing experience. Unfortunately, they chose to focus on the wrong aspects of the game and have just ruined it. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone who found joy in PMCEDX, because it robs you of the soul. I'd rather go play some more of DX since it's compatible on Xbox One now. Actually, I think that's exactly what I'll go do.