With two players it becomes a mess, especially if there’s a disparity in skill between the two, meaning one has to pick up the slack and will always be monitoring their lesser-skilled teammate. This makes the whole experience so much slower. Again this is achieved by one of you chewing the front end, and the other racing round and eating the other end of the ghosts, meeting in the middle. Eventually you’ll pick up a power pellet, and must then work together to chase and chomp down the ghost train. Two Pac-Man (Men?) start on the screen, and must collect all the pellets before meeting together to ‘burst’ the fruit, essentially by kissing, before moving onto the next board. It’s clunky, frustrating and becomes more about micromanagement than the fast-paced excellence that Pac-Man is known for. In practice, it’s very much like Pac-Man meets Bubble Bobble, though not half as fun as that combination sounds. Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 Plus brings over all the content from the original release and adds a new “Plus 2P” mode, a new co-op score attack where two players must work together to collect pellets, take down ghosts and rack up the highest score possible. Couple this with an inconsistent framerate and we have a port that does more harm than good. Now, we have the same problems on Nintendo Switch, where yet another needless mode only serves to complicate things further, leading to a frustrating and poor experience. Superfluous additions that took away from the simplistic brilliance of the first meant it didn’t shine as brightly. Last year the team tried to make lightning strike twice with a sequel, but it didn’t quite deliver in the same way. How do you improve on perfection? Bandai Namco pulled the trick off once before with Championship Edition, when it turned the iconic Pac-Man into an incredible modern arcade game. The score atop the screen is of our from our review of the original release, which you can read in full below our Switch verdict. Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 is still a fun game at heart, but overall it actually feels like a backwards step from its predecessor.*Editor’s Note* Below is our thoughts on the Switch port of Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 Plus. The fact that a fairly long tutorial is needed to explain all these elements speaks volumes really. Little "cut-scenes" that play out for certain events and pointless "boss battles" etc all interrupt the flow of the gameplay without adding anything of worth and the way the ghost now move at random (rather than remaining in a train) once you collect enough pellets to eat them adds an unneeded element of luck. Perhaps realising that they'd pretty much perfected the formula already Namco seem to have taking the kitchen sink approach to this sequel but, rather than adding to the formula, they've simply over-complicated matters. With my Xbox360 no longer in working order I jumped at the chance to pick up this sequel on the PS4 but must admit I came away disappointed. Pac-Man Championship did a fantastic job of updating the classic formula whilst retaining the core of what makes it Pac-Man and I spent many Pac-Man Championship did a fantastic job of updating the classic formula whilst retaining the core of what makes it Pac-Man and I spent many hours trying to beat my own personal, and a few friends, best scores.
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