Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs (PS5)

It’s not too hard to imagine a Pac-Man battle royale. Throw tens of players into one giant maze and let the last survivor be the winner. Some changes would be necessary, the ghosts that pursued him back in the 1980 arcade game taking the player out wouldn’t be as exciting as having other players eliminate each other, but it at least seems like the start of an idea. In 2020, the doomed gaming platform Google Stadia would see the idea toyed with in the form of Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle, but releasing on an unpopular platform and having a price tag inherently limited its reach and potential success. Come 2024 though and the game would be revived across every major platform as Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs, unfortunately still bearing a $20 price tag that no doubt limited its reach. Regardless of the player count though, the bigger question remained: Did Bandai Namco manage to make the shared maze concept work?

 

Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs is a purely multiplayer experience, at least technically since the game will fill matches with game controlled opponents if there are not enough human players. The only gameplay is to enter the maze with 63 other Pac-Men, and at first, everyone has their own personal region to chomp dots in. As you eat dots, you’ll earn points, but you’re not doing so to earn a high score. To avoid elimination, you must stay above a certain score threshold, players who aren’t keeping up being periodically culled, their sections of the maze also disappearing while the remaining ones are pressed together to avoid gaps. The score requirements aren’t designed to force eliminations though, meaning as the player numbers reduce, you can keep the battle going for quite a while as long as the remaining participants can keep up, but eventually, one Pac-Man will come out on top… although it often comes quite suddenly and almost without warning.

The point elimination system sounds like a way to incentivize players to engage with the classic Pac-Man gameplay of chomping dots, but not only is it a fairly passive way of competing with the other players, but the game devotes very little fanfare to player eliminations. So many rounds of Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs seemed to come to an abrupt end as I played since the remaining players were mazes away and failed to keep up, the win not feeling like it had much value since the format doesn’t necessarily demand engaging with the other participants. Even when in the maze with other Pac-Men though, the game doesn’t draw much attention to that key moment when victory is earned. It throws you to the victory or failure screen quickly and without any interesting summaries of how the match went, but there’s another factor that makes it hard to even tell how well others are doing.

 

In Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs, you can be eliminated from play not just from failing to keep up when it comes to points, but from the more traditional methods of actually dying. If Pac-Man touches one of the four ghosts found in each region of the maze, he’ll lose a life. You can grab a Power Pellet to temporarily turn the ghosts in the current maze segment blue to chomp them for some decent points, but if another player is in your maze, you can also gobble them up to take one of their lives. Maze regions only periodically open up to allow access to other players, meaning you aren’t always under threat from this, but invading other mazes to snatch up their pellets or try to hunt them down at least makes the battle royale feel a bit more competitive rather than isolated fights to accrue higher and higher scores. Oddly, when you start a match, you will already have a few lives and you can even earn more. This means even when you go for the kill, the points you earn are likely to be more meaningful than the life a player lost, and even in those tense finales where you’re all in one small section of the maze trying to stay in the match, it rarely feels like lives will be the deciding factor.

 

There are some ideas in place meant to encourage a few different ways to play as well as more aggressive maze invasions though. Limited time missions will appear, these giving you big point boosts, an extra life, or some other reward should you complete them. Oftentimes these are things like invading other maze portions, chomping other Pac-Men, or doing standard tasks like eating dots or chomping ghosts while in a rival’s maze. These give you some incentive to leave your home maze beyond the small form of sabotage that is stealing an opponent’s dots for yourself, but there is another system in place to reward players who invest in their specific maze segment. Already, clearing dots will eventually make a high value fruit appear to gobble up, but if all the dots in a maze portion are munched, then the maze refreshes, the ghosts a bit faster and a big point boost rewarding you for clearing the maze out. The maze segment will even change its shape up, meaning you will have some variety in the small halls you navigate, and knowing when to go for clearing out mazes or finding new ones can gain you an edge against other human players.

Sadly, most matches of Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs are likely to be filled with bots, the game-controlled Pac-Men not very good even if you’re playing at high levels of Ranked Mode. In fact, even the ghosts aren’t as aggressive as you might expect, often deliberately leaving room for escapes rather than always trying to close in on you with lethal intent. This choice was at least likely made to make encounters with other players more notable than ghosts, but it also makes the regular dot munching much easier, and that’s before you even factor in power-ups. Special power orbs will float through the maze, the player able to grab them to immediately activate them or store up to two for later use. Some of these are beneficial, like a shield that makes you invulnerable for a while or a stink that makes ghosts flee from you, while others are harmful such as speeding up the ghosts in the maze or attracting them towards you. Activating the negative ones in a rival’s maze can be useful so even the negative ones purpose, but they mostly range from having small impacts that are maybe a bit convenient to being far too effective when active. They don’t end up adding that needed spice that Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs feels like it’s lacking, the format not taking bold risks and thus many matches feel alike, especially since you’re not being forced to even interact with the other players.

 

Elimination Mode and Ranked Mode are the only two ways to play Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs, and the only real difference is Elimination has you play with anyone while Ranked will try to match you with players of a similar skill level, something that doesn’t really end up happening due to low player counts and matches starting too quickly to get a group. Beyond chasing the hollow reward of easily climbing the ranks by trouncing bots, your only other motivator to play will be the coins you earn for the in-game shop. You can dress up Pac-Man in a range of hats and outfits as well as choose what theme your segment of the maze will feature. Beyond some looks that reference other Bandai Namco properties like Dig Dug, Klonoa, and Galaga, you’ll mostly have ideas like Pac-Man wearing funny glasses or dressing like an animal. The maze themes can be a bit more interesting, the video game themes certainly eye catching but even the seasonal ones can have a range of nice visual touches that can be a bit busy and yet they don’t make navigating the mazes any harder. They’re a treat when you have the time to look, but also, in the shared maze, you’ll see all the other themes if you travel around. Taking over an enemy maze with your theme by munching the last dot or being there when they die can be a bit of a neat touch, but it’s not really going to make the time spent earning coins for these cosmetic rewards feel worthwhile.

THE VERDICT: Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs uses far too delicate a touch when adjusting the Pac-Man dot munching formula for a battle royale. The incentives for interfering with or even just encountering other players are weak and short-lived, and the points-based eliminations with almost zero fanfare when they happen leads to many victories feeling like they are just dropped in a player’s lap unceremoniously. Playing it close to just regular Pac-Man with some extra power-ups and the ability to hop into new mazes can work for a bit, but even it suffers a touch since the ghosts are not that aggressive so there isn’t as much pressure on you to play well. Even if most matches weren’t just you versus just bots, the interconnected maze that serves as the battlefield ends up feeling isolating because of how disconnected everyone’s chances of survival are to the other players.

 

And so, I give Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs for PlayStation 5…

A BAD rating. It’s quite sad when a battle royale’s best moments are when it best mimics solo play, Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs more enjoyable if you treat it like a regular maze game or during those special moments you just so happen to have a truly competitive player with you in the final two. Even when you’ve got that other person trying hard to stay ahead in the points game though, there’s not too much interference possible unfortunately. You can grab Power Pellets to try and chomp them, but there are four per maze segment, so they’ll probably grab one too and be safe. There are some tactical tricks to pull like feigning a pellet grab but instead saving it, but other than the occasionally appearing power-ups that might not even swing things much, it can still feel like competing players are mostly just playing regular Pac-Man until eventually one side happens to be the winner. It’s a shame the bot intelligence doesn’t scale, AI players who could keep up better feeling like a necessity to give this a good reason to return to it, but charging twenty dollars feels like it doomed the idea from the start. Twenty dollars is enough to make people investigate the game more, to make them look up and find there are few players and little reason to play against the bots, and even those who did buy the game likely found little incentive to return because of the limited rewards for continued play and the generally unexciting presentation. Even if wins weren’t being handed to you too easily in bot matches, unceremonious victories, hardly any details on how the match went, and no effort to highlight how you even clinched victory is more likely to leave a player saying, “Oh! Okay.” rather than pumping their arm in celebration.

 

While I didn’t rate Pac-Man 99 much higher than this other effort to make Pac-Man into a battle royale, it was at least a decent effort to alter the formula so matches could have tense and exciting moments, and it got the presentation down much better for highlighting key moments. It unfortunately was also taken offline about half a year before the release of Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs, meaning the removal of Pac-Man 99 may have been to make way for this inferior experience. This game didn’t have to be a dud though. The abundance of lives feel like an unnecessary touch, the points-based idea could have been better handled through more dramatic presentation or big score incentives for engaging with other players, and more features in general like more drastic power-ups could have lead to the big shake-ups that force a change away from typical play. Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs is too timid in its design though, almost all but guaranteeing there wouldn’t be 64 players interested in playing at one time. In fact, according to SteamDB, the most players to be playing the PC release at one time was 52, so unless there’s a Hail Mary with a pivot to free to play or a drastic overhaul, its possible this game may one day go offline never even seeing a naturally occurring match featuring 64 human participants.