Pac-Man Championship Edition 2: PS4 Review

Pac-Man Championship Edition 2: PS4 Review

Developer: Bandai Namco
Platform: PS4

Mixing chaos with pac-dots, speed with bright neon visuals, Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 is a nostalgic blast of arcade entertainment that's speedy at times, and needs to occasionally slow down.

Essentially, the main basic game is still the best and it's hard to improve on simplistic perfection; which is perhaps why Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 fires everything it has at the screen. And from time to time, that makes it less than ideal to play, but bizarrely, equally enticing.

Using consumable jump dots, ghost trains that can be added to by passing by dormant ghosts, and tumbling from one maze to the next, the game's anarchic touches are simultaneously enthralling and conversely want to make you scream at it to simply slow down.

Speeding through the mazes and scoffing Pac-Dots fills your counter and once it's full, you are offered fruit which when consumed, send you into the next maze. With a clock ticking down and speed rising, precision becomes more of an issue and a frustration as you hurtle into ghosts unexpectedly and unwantingly. The game allows you three bumps into a ghost before said ghost gets angry and comes for you.

Each level is graded and you progress through them by levels of score; it's a necessary touch to do so and the game's desire to see you progress is welcome. But Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 can feel like overload at times - it needs to slow down to improve the flow through of the game and that may be its flaw.

It's certainly not a fatal flaw as the game's simply fun at times; but with a little more breathing in between, it could have been much more.