P.A.CMAN

Presentation
P.A.cman International Edition is Pac-Man remake where, like in the original, you navigate mazes avoiding ghosts and eating dots. The yellow dots increase your score but they are also red dots that reduce it. You choose from six characters, each has a specific speed and number of lives. Each character also possess a unique skill like invisibility, teleport, stop-time. You move using arrows and activate the skill with Enter. At the start you only have access to the "Ranking mode" composed of 3 levels. When you've cleared it you gain access to the "Free mode" composed of 3 themed levels.

Atmosphere
The game uses retro style graphics and music to create a good arcade environment. You and the ghosts are human faces with different hair styles corresponding to the character you choose and his associated skill. Luckily for you, the ghosts don't have any skill.

Gameplay
Your gameplay experience will be strongly influenced by the character you choose. Character skill give situational advantage. The dodging ability is equivalent to a temporary invisibility. This is the most OP skill. The stop-time skill is particularly inefficient because it doesn't freeze the enemies where they are but takes about one second to freeze them. So they often block the path you wanted open. Teleport is very useful in levels without the right-to-left-warp. One of the characters uses a random skill. This is totally impractical. You'll end-up not using his skill at all.

Speed is a much more important characteristic than skill or number of lives. The faster you move, the faster you collect dots and the easier you can escape from ghosts. Moreover, there are blue dots that renders ghosts vulnerable. The faster you move, the easier you'll catch the ghosts... but it's useless: killing ghosts doesn't raise your score. Ghosts don't have a home, so they respawn somewhere around the center of the maze where you could be eating dots. A ghost that respawn on you results in a frustrating instant death. You shouldn't use the blue dot to kill ghost but only to eat as many dots as possible while they can't hurt you.

The red dots are so numerous and located in such way that you'll be force to collect most of them. This makes the yellow vs red dots mechanic more of an annoyance than adding thoughts on path choices.

When you've lost all your lives, the game restarts and shows that annoying startup animation. This increase the downtime between plays sessions. You'll more likely quit than retry.

Overall
This game adds a lot of mechanics to the original but polishes none of them. You'll have some fun trying each for their novelty and some frustration as well.