Pac-Man 99 (Switch)

The only way to compete against other players in the 1980 arcade game Pac-Man was by trying to earn a higher score than them, so some major adjustments would be needed to make that maze game into an active competition between 99 players playing simultaneously. The idea of having every player in one massive maze was already utilized in the Stadia exclusive Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle though, but Pac-Man 99 is not Arika’s first rodeo with the battle royale format, having previously created Tetris 99 and Super Mario Bros. 35. In a similar vein to those games, the approach taken here is often focused more on individual survival than actively antagonizing other players, but the battle to be the last one standing in this battle royale does feel a little more solitary than its companion titles.

 

Pac-Man 99 reproduces the single maze from the original Pac-Man arcade game and all matches will take place there. Purchasable downloadable content can change the appearance of the maze, but they all feature the same design where the playfield is symmetrical vertically but features some small differences in its two horizontal halves. The player controls the moving mouth that is Pac-Man with the goal being to eat the white dots populating the blue and black maze, the only controls necessary to do so being ones tied to movement. Many familiar elements of the original game are still present, such as the four colored ghosts who patrol the maze and can kill you instantly with a touch. Learning their movement styles isn’t as important in Pac-Man 99 as it is in the original game, because most of the time you’ll want to have a Power Pellet active, these special power-ups found in each corner of the maze. Ghosts will turn blue when a Power Pellet is active and you can eat them to send them back to a box at the center of the maze where they’ll need some time to recover and reenter as a threat, but these ghosts and the Power Pellet system featured here involve some of the first divergences from typical Pac-Man play to accommodate the expanded scope.

In a round of Pac-Man 99, all players only have a single life, and the moment they perish, they lose the round and will have to search for another group of 99 to play. The game will populate empty spots with computer controlled opponents as necessary if it can’t find players in time, and during a match, you will see simplified representations of your 98 opponents’ playfields on the left and right hand sides of your own maze. Your goal is to outlast every other competitor, but when someone grabs a Power Pellet and starts eating ghosts, that begins sending over a form of interference to the mazes of other players. For every ghost munched, a Jammer Pac-Man appears in an opponent’s maze, the jammers looking like black and white versions of the game’s simple yellow hero. Coming into contact with a Jammer Pac-Man is not fatal though, but it will slow you down, and with them moving through your maze and sometimes actively pursuing you, they can end up hindering you enough that the ghosts manage to catch you and kill you. Grabbing a Power Pellet of your own though will immediately defeat all Jammer Pac-Men in your maze, meaning they’re actually fairly easy to mitigate much of the time. Red Jammer Pac-Men are outright deadly to the touch though and harder to get rid of, but they have their own weakness in the form of the fruit that appears near the middle of the maze.

 

While a round of Pac-Man 99 starts with a full maze of dots set out before you, eventually the maze will need to be refreshed, and you’re the one in charge of making new pellets appear. Once you have consumed enough dots, a fruit will show up beneath the ghostly prison at the screen’s center, and once you grab that fruit, the maze will be repopulated with more dots to devour. To make the single maze design on offer a touch more interesting, you won’t always have a full maze refresh when a fruit is eaten, sometimes only a few corners getting dots and on occasion the only pellets that appear are the four Power Pellets in the corners. This is meant to keep you on your toes a touch since otherwise it is fairly easy to find an efficient circuit of the rectangular maze you won’t need to deviate from often, but the Red Jammer Pac-Men are a good addition since their presence can block off entire routes and require some adaptation to survive. Red jammers do freeze in place when a Power Pellet is active though, but since they only completely disappear when a fruit is eaten, sometimes you can find yourself in a tight spot as you might not have easy access to enough dots to devour to make a fruit appear. Once you understand the basics of Pac-Man 99, the main disruption to your efforts will likely be these deadly invaders, but your ability to mitigate the threat they pose remains reasonable and only rarely will they feel unfair such as times where one might appear suddenly in your path.

 

As a round continues on and players are eliminated, Pac-Man 99 naturally speeds up and certain other factors start to shift gradually. The time your Power Pellets last isn’t totally consistent, meaning sometimes the ghost turn back to normal after barely a second whereas other times you can certainly take your time chaining the Power Pellets. A nice ring-shaped timer appears in the middle to show you how long your current power-up will last, and eating a ghost will give it a temporary boost, this important to making the ghost train system more viable. When you grab a fruit, the two vertical columns beside the score and information boxes will be filled with small sleeping ghosts. These ghosts are harmless to the touch, but when you gobble them up, they’ll join a train behind one of the normal ghosts currently moving around the maze. Even when they’re trailing that spirit they can’t hurt you, but when a Power Pellet is active, they’ll turn into full-size blue ghosts you can gobble up and get a chain going. This is how you are able to send a sizable amount of jammers into the mazes of other players, and if you want to more aggressively eliminate others, you’ll want to make sure your route through the maze includes traveling these columns and eventually grabbing a large chain of blue spirits to pester your opponents.

While the sleeping ghost system gives you some way to engage with other players beyond just trying to survive what is sent over, it still feels a little hands-off. Your attacks will hit multiple other players at once, but with jammers being so easily eliminated means it still won’t be too hard for the other players to deal with them much of the time, even if a large batch is sent their way. The simple visuals representing other players also means you can’t really see the effects of your attack even if you might get a notification indicating a successful KO afterwards. You can adjust how the game automatically picks targets for your jammer strikes, there being a bit of strategy if you can time a target shift right. Normally it is set to Random so it’s just whatever unlucky souls end up on the receiving end, but the Counter setting sends Jammers to players who are targeting you, Hunter aims to pick off players who are performing well, and Knockout tends to focus on easy prey that appear to be close to losing. You’ll have to take the game’s word these selections are accurate, but even if you do enable manual targeting, it’s hard to really look at the tiny representations of other player’s screens and consider your targets, especially since you’ll need to stay active to avoid costly mistakes in your own maze.

 

One of the more effective means of having greater control over your fate though is the ability to select the exact benefits a Power Pellet provides. Standard is a no-frills mode similar to traditional Pac-Man play as well as how the power-up has been described so far in this review, but shift it to the Stronger setting though and your powered up time will be shortened as a trade-off for sending more jammers over towards your targets. Speed is catered more towards survival, the player moving through the maze faster but also sending less Jammer Pac-Men to other mazes when they munch a ghost, while the Train setting has perhaps the most perceptibly impactful adjustment as more sleeping ghosts will appear to gobble up but they’ll also come with a few Jammer Pac-Men in tow so you could end up harming yourself a bit with this option. Besides Train, some of these can still feel like you aren’t seeing the full impact of your choices because it’s hard to gauge how much of a spoiler you’re being for other players, but the animations and visual effects to mark large chains still make it sort of satisfying to get a long train going knowing that you likely increased your chances of being the last Pac-Man standing.

 

In the standard release included with Nintendo Switch Online memberships, Pac-Man 99 is a purely multiplayer experience, the goal being to grab that number one spot with there little in the way of rewards. Some purchasable downloadable content does add the ability to compete against a full suite of 99 computer players without needing to play online and even includes solo challenges like trying to earn as high a score as possible with only three lives or trying to eat 12 fruits before time runs out. With Pac-Man 99 servers going offline in December of 2023, these single-player options will eventually become the only available modes. Removing the multiplayer competition element removes some of the impact of getting first but also, the limited perceivable interaction between players means it won’t feel too different if you compete against AI controlled opponents instead. It mostly becomes a game of traditional Pac-Man but with a few more complications to prevent it being as repetitive as the original, and that can certainly still hold some value even if the competition angle doesn’t excite you.

THE VERDICT: Pac-Man 99 keeps some of the original arcade game’s survival challenge in tact but adds a new layer of more energetic play as you’re trying to keep zipping through the maze to replenish the dots and keep your power-ups active. Unfortunately it does feel a little like your attack options lack impact due to the way interference is handled. It’s hard to make out if your attacks are really having an appreciable effect on other player and thus there’s little feedback for attempts at strategic play, and when you are attacked it’s often too easy to wipe out the jammers without straying from your normal activities. Red Jammer Pac-Men provide a danger that is a little tougher to be rid of, but overall the single maze and ease with which you can find efficient play styles does mean the excitement wanes even though the fundamental play remains sound.

 

And so, I give Pac-Man 99 for Nintendo Switch…

An OKAY rating. Looking over at Tetris 99 can better demonstrate why Pac-Man 99 isn’t quite as successful at adapting its classic video game to a battle royale format. Tetris 99 not only makes it easy to see how well other players are doing at any time, but recovering from an attack isn’t often an instant and easy process. Jammer Pac-Men don’t pack the punch they need to be the kind of effective disruption that makes attacking other players feel valuable, but the red jammers at least do have more staying power and thus it doesn’t feel like you’re only pestering other players when you gobble up a big train of blue ghosts. The fact that the dots are sometimes placed differently after you snag a fruit is a smart way to stave off a tiny bit of the stagnation caused by constantly navigating the same maze, and one way the standard play could have become more interesting would be if there were a few mazes you could end up playing in, potentially even ones that aren’t as symmetrical so adjustments based on incoming danger could be more disruptive and lead to less moments where you’re falling back on the same strategies. The energy that comes from increased speed and the need to keep your power-ups going does add some zest to navigating the one maze over and over though, there being a clear surge in difficulty as a round goes on, but Pac-Man 99 does still feel a little locked into a certain style of play because it didn’t stray too much from the 1980 arcade game’s recognizable elements.

 

Pac-Man 99 can definitely have some exhilarating moments when you know you’re one of the few players still going, but that’s true of most any battle royale no matter the quality and if you do end up earning the top spot in the match, it doesn’t often feel like it’s because you outplayed your opponent. You outlasted them sure, and that takes some skill and reactiveness to pull off so there is some validity to your victory, but the Jammer Pac-Man concept doesn’t go far enough when it needed to be the compelling method of disrupting other Pac-Man players. If you just want to pop it on during a bit of downtime to see how far you’ll go it at least has involved play since you’ll need to whip around the maze more quickly as the match goes on, but it doesn’t feel like Pac-Man 99 really stepped things up too far from the old scoreboard method of competition due to its weak integration of interaction between players.