It’s a new twist on Pac-Man on your iOS or android device.
Eat the dots, avoid the ghosts unless you have a power pellet, you know the
drill. However, this time the glitch from the 256th board of the
Pac-Man arcade game (that made beating level 256 impossible) is back, slowly
eating away the maze as you head up and up. How far can you go? How long can
you last? How much can you score? How relevant can Pac-Man be in 2015?
Mobile phone games are all the rage these days, and many
claim to offer all kinds of fun for the low low price of free, but very few games
actually deliver on that promise. One game that delivered very nicely was last year’s Crossy Road. A fun take on Frogger, turning it into an
endless scroller in an isometric, pixels turned into boxes kind of thing.
It certainly wasn’t an obvious move to hire Hipster Whale (who made Crossy Road), but in doing so, Namco have struck gold. For anyone who
hasn’t played much Pac-Man recently, it may seem unlikely for a new high score
based Pac-Man game to be anything special as the fundamentals were laid down a
long time ago. Hell, Pac-Man is only two months younger than I am and I’m 35.
Navigate a maze of small dots while avoiding the ghosts. Eat
all the dots to progress to the next level. Use the larger dots (the power
pellets) to turn the tables on the ghosts for a short while. If a fruit item
appears, eat that for a point bonus. Wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka. You know the
game. I have no nostalgia for Pac-Man, but the fundamentals are excellent and still work 35 years later. I’m more than happy to say that Pac-Man 256
hasn’t broken what works.
Hipster Whale haven't made one of those free to play games
that are only fun if you buy all the doodads with real money. 256 is as fresh
as the brilliant Pac-Man Championship Edition DX was five years ago. Taking
some leads from Crossy Road, Pac-Man 256 is also an endless scroller realized
in an isometric, pixels turned into boxes kind of look. Unlike Crossy Road, which was throwing a new visual style onto Frogger’s template, since 256 comes
from Pac-Man owners Namco, it remains absolutely faithful to those original
Pac-Man sprites. Dots being turned straight into boxes.
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The OG Pac-Man's Level 256 |
Instead you are thinking about your dot chain. When you look
at the dots in 256 you’ll notice that there are regularly gaps in the dots when
you go certain ways. As you eat unbroken lines of dots, the game counts them
and your score goes up. When you hit 256 it sets off a huge shock wave wiping
out any nearby ghosts. It’s hugely satisfying. Trying to spot these ‘paths’ of
dots as you eat your way upwards, identifying the areas where the ghosts may
trap you or cause you trouble, is the fresh part of 256. It’s a wonderful
mechanic. When a ghost forces you into an area where your chain has to break,
you’ll be cursing them, and when you are racing a ghost to a junction to keep
on the chain, and you make it, and then hit 256 dots and blast the little devil
off the board, you’ll feel like the biggest badass around.

to continue. These tokens are how they monetize the game and the game dolls them out pretty generously. While you max out at six tokens, you earn one every ten minutes. If you choose not to continue, the game will give you the chance to watch an advert to earn some coins (which you use in the other mode in the game) and also it gives you a specific target like ‘Eat 4 strawberries’ or ‘Eat 8 ghosts’ that you can work on to also earn more. You don’t have to do them in one game.
The freeplay basic mode is a blast and the boards and
patterns change every time to keep it fresh. Pac-Man having just his
traditional abilities of power pellets ensures that comparing high scores here
keeps it a level playing field.
The other mode will cost you one of those tokens to play, offering a bunch of different power
ups. You can pick three power
ups to use at a time, and these will replace some of the power pills. As you
play the game, you will unlock more and more of these power ups, and you can use
the coins you earn playing the game to upgrade them. Upgrading a power up makes
it unavailable for a while (and that time gets longer as you level up powers
more and more) but it increases how long it lasts, or how many points you score
for killing a ghost with it.
I haven’t unlocked them all yet, but I’ve unlocked about
half of them, and they remain pretty fun to use. They include a laser that
shoots out from Pac-Man’s mouth in the direction he is heading, killing any ghosts in
its line of fire, a stealth power up that lets you sneak past ghosts, a fire
power up that leaves a burning trail behind you that kills any ghosts that come
into contact with it, and a tornado power up that hunts down the nearest
ghosts. There’s more than a dozen to discover, and part of the fun is unlocking
these and seeing what each one does.
You can buy a few dozen credits, should the one every ten
minutes or so not be enough, and if you really love the game, you can spend $8
dollars to remove the credit limitation on playing this mode. I haven’t made my
mind up yet on whether or not I want to do this, but as I’ve been perfectly
happy playing the free mode while waiting for my credits to fill back up, I don’t
think I will.
Pac-Man 256 has a great look, is really easy to play from the second you begin, and a total blast overall. The endless randomly generated level and single life
(unless you want to use a credit) keeps me coming back again and again to see
if I can beat my previous score. You only need a spare few minutes to have a
few goes which makes it perfect as a free phone game. The only criticism I have
is that the game could have done with some music (one area that CE DX has the
game beaten, hands down).
If you ever had fun chasing blue ghosts around a maze and
have an iOS or android device, this generous free to play offering is something
I feel safe giving Namco and Hipster Whale’s latest take on the formula my
strongest recommendations. Download it right now.
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