The Odyssey² Today: K.C.’s Krazy Chase! (Odyssey²)
Despite the legal situation around K.C. Munchkin! and its eventual removal from store shelves, copying the Pac-Man formula did give the Odyssey² a recognizable hit and they didn’t want to waste the closest thing they had to a mascot and potential game series. A year after the release of K.C. Munchkin!, K.C.’s Krazy Chase! came out, and surprisingly, the game had some fairly unique ideas!
K.C.’s Krazy Chase! carries a few recognizable elements from the ill-fated first game. You are once again playing as K.C. Munchkin, but this time the little guy has found a most unusual way to look less like Pac-Man, navigating the maze by rolling around like a ball instead of constantly munching. A few little touches were added to make him more endearing as well. His smile while at a standstill returns, but when he beats a level, K.C. Munchkin bounds up and down with a large grin and when he dies, he’ll sadly wave farewell with an antenna before disappearing. Despite being an Odyssey² game, the visuals have a bit of personality and pull small tricks to avoid stagnation. Repeat plays of a maze change the color so it looks a little different and your main enemy in the game can shift from a drab frowning worm to a smiling rainbow centipede, the game showing a much greater commitment to presentation than its predecessor.
The world of K.C.’s Krazy Chase! may look a bit familiar when you start it up, and at first it will look like its cribbing Pac-Man’s mazes once again, but the gameplay has completely done away with dots and now adds something quite different to chase down in the form of the Dratapillar. Moving about the maze is a long creature made up of multiple orbs and it is your goal to eat every part of the caterpillar’s body except for its deadly head. This is the game’s “Krazy Chase”, and K.C. Munchkin must maneuver around the maze to attack the Dratapillar from behind, but your quarry can prove your demise if it manages to hit you from the front. If you’re lucky, you can bisect the Dratapillar from the side, but all orbs still need to be eaten to complete the level… although strangely, the Dratapillar can help a bit with this, as he’ll gladly eat removed segments of his body if he ends up running into them.
This unique mechanic is a step in the right direction, and there are quite a few supplementary factors to make it more enjoyable. The Dratapillar is aggressive and will go towards you if you are in its path, but it’s never so persistent that you can’t find an escape route and it can never turn backwards, making tail-chomping less risky. There are two other enemies in the maze who will lightly pursue you as well and they closely copy the Dratapillar’s pursuit logic, but if you bite into a segment of the big guy, the little enemies run away as you can now run them over to stun them, earning points and incapacitating them for a bit. K.C.’s Krazy Chase! does indulge in the repetitious design of playing through the same maze over and over after each victory, but it adds a random factor that isn’t too intrusive and helps keeps things a bit fresh each go through. Trees will slowly sprout throughout the maze, their presence a bit of a double-edged sword for K.C. Munchkin. The Dratapillar must slow down to munch on these tress if they are in its path, but K.C. will have to do the same if he hits one, meaning either character can gain the edge in catching the other. The trees also are a nice design trick to make the same maze technically and visually distinct between the repeating rounds.
K.C.’s Krazy Chase! impresses with its ability to outdo its predecessor, with a novel concept that has clear inspirations but a unique feel. Once you see beyond it being better than K.C. Munchkin! though, you’ll see that K.C.’s Krazy Chase! still has a few issues with sustainability. Krazy Chase only has five standard mazes built-in, and while their designs are well tailored to the gameplay, you can quite quickly learn the tricks behind them. The Dratapillar’s movements almost always start the same, you begin in the same spot, and you can usually snag a segment of the Dratapillar early and keep snagging them to keep the other two enemies at bay. If you’re going for points you hit that inevitable balancing act of trying to get more easy loops or going for risky actions in the first loops. Eating Dratapillar segments and stunning the small baddies gives you the most points, and you can earn a single point for munching a tree, but going the safe path of just chomping on the caterpillar’s parts and repeating the level with the same strategy doesn’t really feel like a worse option than trying to squeeze as many points out of a stage as possible. Play grows faster as the maze loops increase, but whether that’s easier to deal with than squeezing points out of dangerous situations in the slow stages will fall on individual playstyles and reflexes.
The maze maker from K.C. Munchkin! returns, giving you the option to make up for the low stage variety by making an ephemeral one of your own you can only play until the system is shut off, but it feels like Krazy Chase needs more than a little customization to lengthen its life. A couple little touches help the standard mazes stay a little fresh, but there’s no shake-ups or creative gimmicks like Munchkin’s invisibility mode. Thankfully, the issues with K.C’s Krazy Chase! are more with sustainability than content quality. It is a fine game to put on and play for a bit, but it does feel like a randomization mode would have done wonders in this game, or at least one with some limiters so it doesn’t make places where the Dratapillar wouldn’t have the room to worm around.
THE VERDICT: A clear improvement over K.C. Munchkin! and one with its own ideas, K.C’s Krazy Chase! creates a maze-muncher where your biggest source of points and biggest threat are one and the same. The Dratapillar’s concept ensures danger and success are closely tied, and while enemies are smart enough to worry about and the random trees sprouting make repeating mazes a bit more exciting, it still feels like Krazy Chase is missing at least one more gimmick that would make the gameplay enjoyable enough to warrant a greater time investment.
And so, I give K.C’s Krazy Chase! for the Magnavox Odyssey²…
An OKAY rating. K.C’s Krazy Chase! redeems the Odyssey²’s unusual de facto mascot, but the little guy couldn’t quite make a memorable hit that sticks with the gaming public. Krazy Chase! is by no means bad, and a game that took the initiative on adding more levels instead of asking the player to carry that slack could find itself with something solid and worthy of revisit. For the short time it lasts, the game is decent enough and provides a nifty concept with a few factors that help it stay fresh on small visits, but there’s nothing really compelling to capture the player long-term due to predictable enemies and no major gimmicks that enhance the basic play.
While not the best note the small series could end on, K.C.’s Krazy Chase! helped make sure that K.C. Munchkin could at least claim to have a decent game under his belt before he disappeared into the annals of gaming history.