Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 is just all fun. lots of fun. we have to start off by saying that. If you are a fan of Pac-Man or maybe played Pac-Man before, then you have to try this. Honestly there is no excuse, as there is even a demo for gamers to try and see how mad it is for themselves.

Imagine the original Pac-Man. Good. Then times that action by three. Now you sort of have Pac-Man Championship Edition 2. It’s so colourful and has modern written all over it. Neon lights, flashing lights, solid colours and some unique patterns. When you start the game what hits you before the visuals most likely would be the music. It’s loud, it’s pumping and got a beat. Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 has lots of great music for players to jam to while they are taking on levels. A bit more on the music later.

Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 has primarily two game modes: Score attack and Adventure. it sounds small but when you get into it, it’s much deeper than you initially think. Score attack is pretty much where the main action is at. Players have a limited amount of time to get the highest score possible. This is easy. There are three sub modes for score attack that matter: Single train, Regular and Extreme. In Single train it’s just the player vs one real ghost. The other three ghosts are not coloured in and can’t kill you but they do get in your way, possibly block your path and can easily ruin your chances of getting the high ranks. The real ghost is the can kill you if it’s angry which happens if you bump into them a few times in a row. As you zoom past minions, they join the real ghost and the ghost train grows. Make your ‘single’ ghost train grow as long as possible and then get the power pellet for the chance to score big. Regular is exactly the same except all the famous ghosts: Blinky, Pinky, Inky, Clyde are all real and there to eat you up. Extreme is just like Regular… but.. extreme. Ghosts get angry from being touched once, you have very little lives as well.

Extreme doesn’t sound like that much of a step up from Regular but the single ghost touch rules changes almost everything. When the ghosts are calm, they just move around, get in your way and follow you but when angry they act like they do in the original Pac-Man pretty much. Blinky will chase you down staying o your tail. Pinky will try to go ahead or alongside Pac-Man to try and cut him off. Inky will at times chase you down, like Blinky, or try to trap you like Pinky. Clyde will go wherever he wants, pretty much random. so anger ghosts as little as possible. Now Score attack is also for bragging rights as it’s there where you get ranked with grades from E to S. We are always honest so we must say this. If you get an E for any of these levels then put down your controller and slowly back away from the game and never play again. It’s that bad. D is for children and babies. C is people who’ve never played Pac-Man before or for your parents. B is for casual gamers. A is for skilful Pac-Man and pro wannabes. S is for the professionals. If you can get at least 10 S ranks then consider yourself a Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 legend. Only a few like X35 Earthwalker got an S for all the single train and Regular levels.

Getting an S requires players to play near perfectly. If you get killed once your chances of getting an S drastically lowers. So if you die, we recommend you retry. Find the path of the pellets (dots) for an easier level navigation. Build up the ghost trains as much as possible. Complete levels as fast as possible so that you can get the power pellet for the chance to score big. Some levels require more focus on time and ghost trains than the pellets and vice versa, so when you beat the level check the graph for a while to see where most of your score comes from and what adjustments you must make to get that grade. If you are feeling real competitive then take not of the global ranking. Players can see what rank they are on the global leader board for each level. For example in one of the levels, X35 Earthwalker was ranked in the top 15 of all Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 players around the world… and that was the level where he messed up right at the end so would have gotten a higher rank. Oh well. So yeah, playing score attack seriously can get incredibly tense, and down right frustrating when you are on a perfect run but some stupid ghosts get in the way and ruin everything for you. Worse the ghost trains come of their path ruining your chances of going to the next level fast.

Adventure is like Super Mario world map in terms of seeing from the top, moving from level to level, boss levels etc. It’s actually very simple. There’s ten levels. Each level requires players to eat a certain amount of fruits within a time limit. Off course, the amount of ghosts present, the amount of fruits required, the amount of power pellets, whether the fruits or power pellet moves all varies from level to level. Now there are three main difficulties to play each level on: Easy, Normal and pro. Pro is how it should be played as you have very little time and everything is fast. It pushes players to play perfectly getting them to that higher skill. It will help some players get good enough to get S grades in Score Attack. The main objective in Adventure is to collect stars. these stars are used to access the next boss and area. The amount of stars you get depend on the difficulty you play on. Easy gets one, Normal gets two and Pro gets three. Beating levels in easy works out only for the first area. Then the amount of stars required are more than what you get for completing all the levels on easy. It forces you to beat the levels on Normal. The next area requires even more and the last boss requires a huge amount of stars that it’s obvious that players must beat all the levels in pro difficulty to face it. The last level of each area is a boss ghost who is much larger than any other ghost. They always stay in the background and when you eat enough to summon the fruit or power pellet the boss always bites hard to turn all ghosts angry who then try to eat you. If you take too long to complete the stage then the boss automatically destroys you as well. So it’s only two game modes but both Score Attack and Adventure have a lot for players to dive into and they are challenging. 

Time for some of the negatives about Pac-Man Championship Edition 2. Firstly we feel they are lacking in game mode variety. With so many past Pac-Man games, the developers could have easily created other game modes to keep things exciting longer. After all it’s just Score attack and Adventure. Not good enough. Second the levels in Adventure mode are basically the same. It’s always eat a certain number of fruits and that’s it. Sure some may require players to eat a power pellet to eat all the ghost within the time to get to the next maze which has the fruit but it’s all the same. Again it’s a lack of variety. There is so much more they could have done. Third is that multiple times the ghost trains will come of the paths which can easily mess up runs for S rank because they waste your time. host trains are suppose to and should stick to the clearly defined paths and never leave. Knowing you are about to eat a ghost train when all of a sudden they turn of the path and now you miss it and waste so much precious time is one of the worst feelings in this game. Fourth is that the bosses in Adventure mode so far (not sure about the last one yet) are lame. They just sit in the background and basically don’t do anything except for when you summon the fruit or run out of time. It’s honestly lame and a total let down.

Overall Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 is a great game. The two game modes can easily get players at the edge of their seats with how much you have to sit up and focus on what’s happening as it’s mainly fast paced gameplay. Replaying levels to get the S rank doesn’t get boring, you instantly know where you were lacking or went wrong and go straight in to do it again. The maze designs in some levels are awesome and the music forever stays a big factor for this game. Off course Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 has it’s negatives but it’s the best Pac-Man game in terms of pure Pac-Man gameplay which is eating pellets, fruits and ghosts. It’s truly worth playing if you are a Pac-Man fan. It’s still worth trying if you aren’t as this is a very good game indeed. Now Pac-Man may lots going on but not as much as… the ‘Earth Walk!’