Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 Plus (Switch eShop) Review

Players’ enjoyment of Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 Plus (Pac-Man CE2+) will largely depend on how thrilling you find chasing high scores on a leaderboard. Pac-Man CE2+ offers a couple of different modes for high score hunters, but aside from the clever Switch-exclusive co-op mode, the rest of the game falls short of recapturing the best form of everyone’s favourite pie-shaped pellet gobbler.

Although shades of the original arcade game remain, your classic coin-op Pac-Man experience this is not. Pac-Man CE2+ is an absolute LSD-trip of a game where the pace is cranked up to frantic levels of mayhem. Featuring two main modes to wakka-wakka your way through, in addition to online leaderboards, Pac-Man CE2+ bets its existence on players enjoying the core experience of the game. Score Attack, which can be played in either single or two-player variants, and Adventure mode are where you’ll spend most of your time searching for that Pac-Man high.

Adventure Mode is somewhat disingenuous in its title, as it is more of a bite-sized mission mode, where each level is strictly standalone. This mode pits your skills against a level with deliberately placed pellets, where the goal can vary from eating all the pellets and fruit, to consuming the ghosts in your way, all the way to a boss encounter against a giant ghost looming in the background which is damaged by each screen you clear. Every mission can be attempted at varying difficulty levels, changing the time limit established for success. Due to the specific design of each mission, these levels feel more akin to high-octane puzzles than what the classic Pac-Man experience does. Although these missions are quick and self-contained, I swiftly felt pangs of monotony despite all the pretty colours and sounds emanating from the Switch. The only technical issue I could fault was the occasional frame-rate drops, but they only occurred during transitional animations which yielded little to no impact on my gameplay.

While playing for review, my Dad was in town, who was able to view Pac-Man CE2+ through his experience of growing up playing the likes of Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and the original Pac-Man at the local arcades back in the day. Taking him a while to adjust to the turbo-boosted pace of the modern Pac-Man was a challenge, but Dad quickly warmed to the concept. This was largely in part thanks to the Switch-exclusive co-op Score Attack mode, where two players controlling a Pac-Man each work together to eat all the pellets and ghosts, attempting to rack up the highest score possible in five minutes. Particularly handy is the feature where if one player is captured by a ghost, the other player has a short amount of time to rescue them, avoiding a penalty in the process. Following several rounds of Score Attack, Dad – unprompted – declared Pac-Man CE2+ to be an eight out of ten. I asked if he wanted to play another game mode to compare, but Dad, typically confident in his assertion, declined. For reference, his favourite Switch game so far is Golf Story, if that provides any context for his arbitrary score declaration.

Score Attack trumps the heavily-scripted nature of Adventure Mode – the former feels closest to Pac-Man at its best with an element of unpredictability, while the latter feels too rigid in its design to keep you coming back for more. While there is nothing inherently wrong with Pac-Man CE2+, I could not shake the feeling I was consuming the greasy, fast-food equivalent of the arcade legend; its audiovisual design is flashy but yields minimal substance or staying power. For those, like myself, not excited by the challenge of topping the leaderboards, the game’s replayability is limited.

Pac-Man CE2+ is Pac-Man high off his own fame – producing follow-up sequels that continually depart further from what made him popular in the first place. Flashy, but largely superfluous, Pac-Man CE2+ presents short bursts of bite-sized fun with its novel co-op Score Attack mode exclusive to Switch, but the Adventure Mode feels empty in its lack of spontaneity. High score-hunting fiends will be in their element here, but not necessarily those looking for enjoyment without external motivators.

Score: 3.5/5