![]() ![]() ![]() Certain pathways will collapse into the abyss if they’re not crossed quickly, while sparks on the ground might set off an explosive block before you’re finished with it. What you really have to be careful of are the hazards, as no amount of power pellets will save you from blowing yourself up, among other dangers. Pac-Man now has a health bar, with the ghosts taking a surprisingly low amount of it. Unlike the ghosts, however, these special enemies only rarely respawn after you chomp them, making removing them generally your first priority. Cave-Pacpeople will blow jets of fire towards you, while the Anubis-looking monsters will charge up a difficult to avoid homing projectile if they’re left alive long enough. Along with the ghosts, each of the four worlds has their own unique foes to deal with, each of which offers new attacks to avoid. Of course, you also have the ghosts to worry about, which will require the traditional power pellet to keep off of your back for a bit. Lava needs ice blocks pushed into it to create safe passage, certain passages can only be entered from one direction, and certain ghosts will lay out gunpowder that needs to be lit by another enemy to take out certain explosive blocks. The game does a good job of introducing new concepts to the ones you’ve already mastered throughout the game, however. You’ll need to move ordinary boxes around to create platforms and fill holes, and move TNT crates to destroy obstacles before they blow up. Sometimes you’ll be tasked with pressing buttons in a particular order, but most of the time, you’ll be pushing around boxes. More than anything, though, you’ll be solving a lot of puzzles that halt progress to the next part of the maze. Aside from collecting dots, you’ll also occasionally need to hunt for keys to remove lock blocks that occasionally appear. Across the mazes, you’ll find bounce pads to get to other areas, dash panels for knocking certain obstacles over, and floating platforms to carry you across chasms. ![]() Instead, everything you encounter in the environment can be interacted with simply by walking into it, something which makes the game incredibly simple to learn. Surprisingly, at no point during the game are any button presses even necessary, except for advancing dialogue boxes. Pac-Man is only capable of moving around on the paths provided to her. Unlike the assortment of new moves Pac-Man got for his newest outing, Ms. Somewhat annoyingly, you have to get a majority of these stars in order to unlock the final stage. Each level also has several stars to unlock bonus content and hidden levels, which you can earn for finding all the hidden fruit, beating the level’s time trial, hitting a certain score threshold, and finishing the stage itself. The primary blockades are gates that require a certain number of dots to pass through, giving you a reason to scour each level for as many as you can collect. The goal of each stage is as simple as finding the exit, but as expected, it isn’t quite as easy as said. There’s 16 levels to traverse, each made up of a series of small mazes interconnected by various transitions. This one, however, seems to have no relation to the 16-bit Pac-Man games of the past. It wouldn’t be a spoiler to say that a ghost witch is involved, the villain of choice when it comes to Pac-Man games. (The question is raised why Pac-Land contains its own versions of Egypt and China, but it’s best not to think about that.) To add slightly more to the stakes, resident source of exposition Professor Pac-Man has been kidnapped by an unknown force. The plot is especially unimportant, even by series standards an evil witch is trying to steal four magical gems hidden across four regions of Pac-Land. The result, while not anything spectacular, still makes for one of the best games to come out of the ‘arcade game remake’ boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. Instead of a platformer, however, Maze Madness takes the core of ‘eat dots, avoid ghosts’ and adds a massive amount of new features on top of it. With the success of Pac-Man World helping to keep Namco’s mascot relevant in a world of 3D platformers, it must have only seemed logical to update his wife, as well. ![]()
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