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While Nintendo DS owners have already had one Pac-Man game for their console, another is on the way. Pac ‘n Roll is best compared to Super Monkey Ball, with Pac-Man rolling around a number of 3D environments, collecting a lot of yellow pellets that are scattered around the levels. Being a DS game you can assume that the touch screen is being used somehow; here it is used to control Pac-Man around making the game play similarly to the morph ball demo found in the Metroid Prime Hunters demo.
The story in Pan’n Roll is simple. The inhabitants of Pac-World have all been turned in spheres and Pac-Man must save his family. It’s really just a set up for the main game and is the reason why everyone in the game is a ball. It’s fair to say that the gameplay mechanics in Pac ‘n Roll are about as simple as they come, but that isn’t to say that the game is simple.
The levels are populated with ghosts (as you’d expect from a Pac-Man game) and they do their best to hunt you down. You can turn from hunted to hunter by rolling over a special ball that allows you to kill ghosts. As you can imagine, this is an especially useful pick-up and therefore isn’t available all that often. Other pick-ups give you the ability to jump over ghosts, power through walls and withstand more damage, amongst other things.
Visually the game is solid and colourful, but not all that detailed. The environments are blocky, but full of colour, and they seem varied enough to make the rather samey gameplay remain fresh throughout the game; See-saws, moving platforms and ramps were all present in the few levels we played. This isn’t cutting-edge stuff, but perfectly adequate and the style suits the game well.
Controlling Pac-Man is easy thanks to the stylus control and you can guide him around dangerous levels with ease. The faster you move the stylus, the faster Pac-Man rolls, and this precise control is essential for certain sections of the levels. During the few levels that we played in the demo we had to negotiate jumps, moving platforms and rampaging ghosts, but the controls never let us down.
Pac ‘n Roll will be Namco’s second Pac-Man game for the Nintendo DS and it is nice to see that they are developing another game that takes good advantage of the handheld’s abilities. Fans of the Pac-Man series who want a taste of the good old days will be happy to hear that the game also includes the original Pac-Man arcade game, with support for two players.
Pac ‘n Roll doesn’t look like it will win any game of the year awards, but it should fit nicely into the DS game library when it is released this summer. Look for a full review of the game near its release.
