Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures 2

On to part two and thankfully the end of Pac-Man’s Ghostly Adventures... 2. The first thing I noticed is that it is almost a carbon copy of the first game. Rather than repeat myself again – something not really considered a bad thing by Bandai Namco – I will attempt to point out some of the differences.

The game is longer than the last one. I didn’t view this as a good thing at all. I questioned whether I would actually finish the game after I laboured through the first five levels of the first world. There are in excess of forty ‘different’ levels in this thing and most of them are the same except with different scenery and a few other exceptions to be listed below.

They have removed the arcade games and replaced them with vehicle levels. This isn’t a bad thing at all. It means there is more variety to the main game levels and these provided a nice break from the monotonous killing of ghosts and jumping from tree to tree.

The level designs are more intricate... but still linear. There is only one exception to this rule. One of the last levels in the game has a split path. All the rest have a single direction of travel that you follow from start the end.

For two boss battles, Pac-Man gets specially abilities. You can turn into King Kong to fight a T-Rex and get really big to fight a robot. They are one-offs though so it doesn’t add another level of gameplay.

Now for some of the similarities. There is a completely pointless ‘home’ zone where you can walk around having even more pointless conversations with the other characters. You can also unlock some challenge levels in the home area but you don’t get anything for completing these.

Pac-Man is still the most sinfully annoying character ever. This is naturally made worse by the fact that I’ve had to put up with him for two games.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

It’s got 25 achievements so you would think they are the same as the last game right? Well, they’re not. For the most part.

There is only one achievement you will unlock through playing the game and that is for killing 5 stone monsters as granite ball Pac. This is by default a main storyline achievement because you have to kill 5 or more stone monsters to finish some levels.

You have to complete one of each of the different vehicle levels without losing a life. There are 3 of these. You also have the same kill enemies with various Pac forms including the scared ghosts, which will net you another 5 achievements, however another difference here is that you have to use each form’s special move to kill the ghosts. You can’t just chomp them. This was quite frustrating as Metal Pac because his special move attracts ghosts but all you have to go is release the special button to kill the ghosts for it to count. It treats it as a special kill score wise if you press the normal chomp button so I thought my kills were counting when they weren’t. Annoying.

There are two achievements for exploring the home area. You have to speak to all of your friends, which takes a few minutes of exploring, and review all of the character bios which is just flicking through in-game screens about the characters.

There are a few other self explanatory misc ones but if you are playing for the 100% these will come naturally anyway. The biggest pain, and time sync, is that you have to complete all of the levels getting the top score. By default, this will get all of the achievements for playing the game that I have mentioned but you get one achievement for getting the top score in each level of each zone. There are five zones and what I consider to be an excessive amount of levels.

To get the high score, you have to collect all the fruits in each level which carries another achievement. To get all the fruits, you have to visit all arcade zones within each level which carries another achievement. What doesn’t make sense is that there is an achievement for getting all high scores in each of the five zones and then another one for getting all gold medals – which is the same thing as getting the high score in all the levels so it’s redundant.

I mentioned above that there was only one level with a split path and incidentally the creators actually used this to make you replay this one level to net a separate achievement. They are betrayus challenges throughout the game and an achievement for completing all of them. All of them are story related except for the one in this level which is found by going down one branch of the split path. On the other path is all three fruits you need to get the high score. It seems like a really bizarre choice to have only one level out of nearly 50 that has two paths to completion – and one I can’t think of a decent explanation to. Just because?

Downloadable Content – N/A

Ghostly Adventures 2 is a sequel that doesn’t really try to do anything different and offers the same gameplay from the first game. If you liked the first game, this one will be right up your street but if you didn’t like the first one, this one isn’t going to change your mind.