I’m gonna fake it to the left, and move to the right, ‘Cause Pokey’s too slow, and Blinky’s out of sight…wait, that’s the song, which is unfortunately not present in this board game-style video game. In fact, there’s not actually a lot of Pac-Man in this game, as it’s more of a random assortment of Namco stuff. You have Pac-Man, Ms Pac-Man, two Tekken characters, someone from SoulCalibur and the mascot from Ridge Racer. Because of this, it doesn’t really have any identity of its own and feel like they would have been better featuring more classic Namco arcade stuff.
The boards in Pac-Man fever are just dull – a single straight line of tiles, similar to terrible board games like Candyland. You automatically move forward, land on a tile and it does what it means. You just watch things slowly happen, only having input in the rare moment that you can pick on another player or use the shop. The three boards are generic themes, not related to Pac-man or the other games, and from what I can tell, even use the same ordering of the tiles. After everyone moves, you have a minigame.
The minigames fare batter. They’re simple to understand, easy to play and provide a bit of entertainment. There’s a few minigames that are available on all boards, but a lot of them are very loosely themed on specific boards. This does provide a difference to the boards, but means you can play the same one three or four minigames in just one short game. The interesting thing about the minigames is what it gets you: your ranking in the minigame determines how many spaces you move. The leader moves 5, the loser moves one.
This makes it even more of a shame that the boards offer zero strategy. You can’t even get a good look at what’s up ahead, which completely eliminates anything this movement method could have added to the game. Take the board in Mario Party. In most of those, there are multiple routes and options. You need to plan ahead. If movement was tied to minigames, then the mingames would have an added element, as you may want to place second instead of first, or you may want to be as bad as another player so they can’t just move one space.
Instead, we just have nothing of substance.