After the success of Tetris 99 and Super Mario 35, it’s great to see that the Nintendo Switch is being blessed with another classic game reimagined as a large scale online battle royale style game.
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Pac-Man 99 is a collaboration between Nintendo and Bandai Namco and features a jazzed up version of the original Pac-Man game that looks very much as it did in the arcades in the 1980s. As an online multiplayer battle royale game you play what feels like classic Pac-Man but either side of the playing area is flanked by a representation of the other 98 players screens who are also playing. This allows you see how many players are still actively in the game who you have to outlast in your quest to be the last Pac-Man standing.
Gameplay wise this still very much feels like classic Pac-Man, though it does have more of the chaotic feel of the more recent Pac-Man Championship Edition games as pellets regenerate and appear in random areas of the screen and you have all kinds of chaos pop up onto the screen. Of course, this being a competitive game the strategy isn’t the same as it was on classic Pac-Man where you would simply need to dodge the ghosts and collect all the pellets on screen. Instead you are trying to pick up a new type of item which adds more ghosts in a kind of conga line, and then when you grab a power pellet to eat the ghosts you will send all the extra ghosts you catch onto another player’s screen.
From what I could tell this is the main way that the game is competitive in the sense that you can affect another player’s experience on the game. Otherwise it is more a case of outlast your opponents as the game picks up more speed and gets increasingly challenging the longer the round goes on. This is all similar to how puzzle games such as multiplayer Tetris (such as Tetris 99) would work. It doesn’t play like other battle royal games where you actively take out your opponents. It would have been cool if you could jump across to another players screen and eaten them, but that is just wishful thinking which could be a different take on this game.
In addition to the extra ghosts you can make appear you will spot white outline shapes of Pac-Man appear on the screen and if they’re not eaten quickly they will turn into clones of Pac-Man who are harmless to touch at first, but will slow your progress and allow a ghost to catch up to you quicker. I believe this appear due to other players catching the ghosts, but it’s interesting that caught ghosts become clones of Pac-Man himself rather then more ghosts.
If you let this clone Pac-Men stick around for too long they will eventually turn red and when like this they will cause a game over if you touch one. This really adds to the challenge and as you reach the final 10 active players on the board these red Pac-Men hidden amongst the sheer amount of clones and ghosts and chaos on screen is difficult to navigate. This takes a little getting used to and is similar to Super Mario 35 just making things more challenging by throwing more at you rather than the final stages of the round being about you and your opponents out skilling each other. You do have to out skill your opponent, but it’s about your ability to outlast the increasing amount of CPU based characters rather than on something like Fortnite where the final players will be competing against each other’s skill and nerve.
The game is very addictive to play and in the few hours I’ve put into the game so far I’ve only made it to the top 10 a handful of times. The sense that one more try will yield different results is what keeps you coming back and is another reason these battle royale games on Switch work so well.
It is worth noting that just as Tetris 99 first released with the battle royale mode and later added extra modes you had to pay for, this game is also free to play for Nintendo Switch online subscribers, but does have a bunch of extra modes and cosmetic themes you can pay for.
For the purposes of this review I have only played through what you get as part of the base game and have not paid for the extra modes, but they do include a CPU Battle mode which is basically an offline version of the main battle royal mode, which would be great if you wanted to play this on a plane journey or some other location where you couldn’t connect to the net.
The other Deluxe Edition modes include Score Attack and Blind Time Attack where you’ll have to score big or clear the board as quickly as you can within a time limit. I’m sure for Pac-Man mega fans these will be great additional DLC modes, but for the most part many players are likely to feel satisfied with the main Pac-Man 99 mode which doesn’t cost. The fact that you can get these paid modes does suggest that this game will be continually available and not limited like Super Mario 35. You can also get cosmetic DLC themes which don’t change the game play but will allow you to swap out Pac-Man for the ship from Galaxian or characters from other games like Dig Dug.
Conclusion
Overall this is a really addictive game which actually feels better suited to the battle royal gameplay than Super Mario 35, but perhaps not quite as addictive and life consuming as Tetris 99 is. I can see this being a favourite for many Switch fans to crack out for online parties or just to kill some time eating power pellets whenever you have a few minutes spare here or there. Pac-Man is back, and just like with Pac-Man Championship Edition a few years back shows that Pac-Man is the king of reinventing himself with addictive new twists to the classic game.
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