One of the oldest and most well-known video game franchises (and mascots) in the world is Pac-Man, and playing PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle feels like a fantastic way to celebrate the character’s 40-year anniversary. Like Mario 35 and Tetris 99 before it, PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle takes a game nearly every player is familiar with and turns it into a battle royale competition, but the inherent teamwork involved in playing a Pac-Man game with multiple people at once means that, at least until one player accidentally eats another, everyone has the same collaborative goal: to play more Pac-Man.
PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle, developed by Heavy Iron Studios and published by Bandai Namco, only contains two modes: Elimination and Challenge. In Challenge mode, players can simply play Pac-Man for as long as they possibly can while trying to complete objectives like “Collect 10,000 points” or “Eat 5 ghosts.” Although there is no real competition in Challenge mode, players still have access to a massive grid of different Pac-Man boards, each one filled with another player currently doing the same thing they are, and anyone can cross over into anyone else’s territory at any given time.
The act of entering another PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle player’s board is handled through gates which can be located at the top, bottom, or either side of the current Pac-Man arena. These gates occasionally open and close on an in-game timer, but pickups can lock the doors or open them instantly, depending on which icon the player eats. Locking players out can be a useful strategy in PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle’s Elimination mode, but in Challenge mode it’s more of a hinderance to everyone involved.
Completing Challenges and scoring well in Elimination mode rewards the player with experience points and coins, which they can use to buy customization items in PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle’s in-game shop. Thankfully, no items in Pac-Man’s store cost real-world money, and everything currently available can simply be unlocked by playing the game, including a decent (but not overly large) amount of hats, costumes, and strange Pac-Man outfits for players to dress their character up with. Of course, all of this customization and training is just to make sure players look good and feel confident about their skills in PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle’s main attraction – Elimination mode.
Elimination mode in PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle pits one player against 63 others, all of them spread out on their own Pac-Man boards in a large grid. Everyone starts with the same amount of extra lives, and a match is split into five rounds. Each round lasts a few minutes, and at the end of each round the lowest-scoring Pac-Man boards are removed from play and the grid is reshuffled. Gameplay continues until the total game area has been reduced to one single Pac-Man board, at which point the remaining players continue the game as normal until one outlasts the rest.
PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle is a relatively simple game, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth playing, and Heavy Iron Studios has proven there are still plenty of new angles available for Bandai Namco’s long-time video game mascot. One of the reasons Pac-Man has survived so long is because of the inherent quality of its gameplay, something which is, surprisingly, not reduced in the slightest by introducing 63 other people.
Right now, the biggest problem with PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle is simply the fact that it’s only available on Google Stadia. Large-scale multiplayer games need an equally-large audience in order for servers to maintain a constant stream of available matches to join, and reducing the potential player base to one platform (especially when that platform isn’t as popular as others) can be troublesome in the long run. However, for people who do have Google Stadia, or for anyone interested in giving the game streaming service a try, they could do a lot worse than PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle, a game which somehow takes just enough from gaming’s current trends to create an entertaining and original take on a four-decade-old classic without ruining it with bloat and microtransactions.
PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle is available now on Google Stadia. A Stadia code was provided to Screen Rant for the purposes of this review.
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