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Review

Pac in the chain gang

by RevStu (November 8th, 2010 at 9:12 am)

Namco have already had a stab at a colour-matching action-puzzler, in the shape of Pac-Match Party. It came out five months ago and some people are still playing their first game, so the company’s gone back to the drawing board and tried to come up with something that would offer at least a modicum of challenge to a sleepy toddler. This new iPhone/iPod version is a shrunk-to-fit remake of the original iPad release, which explains why it’s called Pac-Chain Compact.

While screenshots make it look a bit like veteran flop Pac-Panic/Pac-Attack, the truth is that Pac-Chain (£1.79/€2,39/$2.99 for either version) is a variant on the ubiquitous Same Game – you know, that one where you tap on any group of adjacent coloured things and they disappear, of which at the last count there were 22,741 varieties on the App Store. Namco have given Pac-Chain its own unique twist, though, which is to say they’ve somehow managed to make it almost incomprehensible.

The gimmick this time round is that as well as tapping to make groups of like-coloured ghosts disappear (and here even two spooks counts as a group), Pac-Man is also roaming around the grid. As you eliminate groups, you’ll sometimes clear a path to bonus fruits or power pills, which briefly turn all the ghosts blue and allow Pac to scoff them for extra points. Chomping the ghosts is also important because new lines of them are constantly added from the bottom of the screen, and if you allow any to be pushed off the top of the grid it’s Game Over time.

That’s basically it. The core gameplay is extremely simple, but Namco have elected to obscure almost all of its precise mechanisms. The blurb mentions a “chain meter” on the right of the screen and a “blue meter” on the left, but offers no clue as to what they’re for. Eventually it’s possible to work out that the chain meter starts when you eliminate a group of four or more ghosts, and any group (of any size) eliminated before it expires is added to a “chain”, but there’s no immediately-apparent benefit to getting such a chain (you don’t visibly score any more points, for example).

Similarly, the blue meter turns out to be a countdown of how long you’ve got left on a power-pill, but sometimes a full meter will suddenly expire after just a fraction of a second for no obvious reason. The grid also contains normal Pac-dots, which I thought might either extend or end power-pill time, but in fact they have no discernible effect on anything in the game, except in so far as your ability to eat them can sometimes create pathways through the ghosts to get to fruit or power-pills.

(One of the more interesting aspects of the game is the way it’s possible to get Pac-Man trapped, in which situation you can keep tapping and eliminating groups of ghosts but can’t get to any of the bonus items, which obviously greatly reduces your chances unless you can get him free again.)

When you eliminate a group of ghosts, sometimes the others fall down/shift over to fill the gap immediately, and sometimes they hang in the air for several seconds first, during which time you can carry on playing as normal. I think this is something to do with being in chain mode, but the game tells you nothing. (Chain mode might also stop new lines of ghosts being added while it lasts.)

Sometimes groups of ghosts will eliminate themselves without you going anywhere near them, which may be something related to the “maze” blocks – the instructions vaguely suggest so – but since you’re always looking somewhere else when it happens it’s hard to be certain. (And sometimes it seems to happen when nothing on screen is moving at all.)

The weird thing is that despite only having a passing grasp of what’s going on, I really like Pac-Chain Compact. The basics are straightforward enough that you don’t have to worry too much about the finer details – just keep eliminating groups and chomping fruit and power-pills and ghosts and you’ll stay alive while you work out all the stuff that Namco should have told you from the start. And crucially, unlike Pac-Match Party a single game won’t take you hours to complete – so far I’m finding Pac-Chain Mode games last around 8-9 minutes, and there’s always Scramble Mode for a quick two-minute attack.

(One of the App Store screenshots suggests that the game might end at level 99, and so far I’ve reached level 97 in 12 minutes, so the main mode may have a maximum length as well. EDIT: Nope, it carries on after you get the Level 99 message.)

The absence of either proper instructions or in-game feedback is a real drag. (It’s possible, for example, to completely clear the screen, at which point the game makes a big fuss of shouting “ALL CLEAR!” – see the picture above – but it doesn’t bother to tell you if you’ve scored a big points bonus or anything, and therefore whether it’s worth taking any risks to try to get an All Clear. I think the answer is no.)

But the game is inherently enjoyable enough, with enough scope for tactics rather than just dumbly reacting to whatever randomly appears on screen, that you mind this flaw less than you ought to – the only thing still really annoying me about the inadequate instructions, in fact, is not knowing why my blue meter sometimes ends suddenly.

The actual biggest flaw of PCC, and the thing that ultimately costs it a Podgamer Recommended badge, is the inexplicable, idiotic absence of online high scores. Scramble Mode has Facebook connectivity, but Pac-Chain Mode doesn’t for some reason (you do at least get separate high scores for each of its three difficulty settings), and neither has proper leaderboards – which is bizarre, as Namco has embraced Game Centre with most of its other titles.

That alone makes it hard to recommend at the current asking price (though Namco have very frequent discount promotions and it’d definitely be worth 59p/€0,79/99¢), but if you’re happy just challenging yourself, or if it gets a leaderboards update, then Pac-Chain Compact is one of the better action-puzzlers I’ve played, on any format.

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