Pac-Man: It's a battle royale in 2 new games

The battle royale genre has been hugely popular with Fortnite and Fall Guys. Not wanting to miss out on a trend, BandaiNamco has published not one but two Pac-Man games that take advantage of the concept.

The first, Pac-Man: Mega Tunnel Battle, on Stadia features 64 players battling to stay alive against ghosts and each other. Players start off alone wandering through interconnected maps. They can take portals that occasionally open and invade an opponent’s maze. Once there, they can the help opponent finish eating the pellets and upgrade the map or more likely they can cause havoc. A rival can steal power-ups that flit through the corridors. These can be extra lives, a shield or even a smelly aura to scare ghosts away. What’s even better is that an opponent can grab a Power Pellet and try eating an unpowered Pac-Man as if he were a ghost.

Like all good battle royale games, it’s cutthroat. Players have up to three lives. Once they use those up, they lose and can spectate among the remaining players and even vote to toss items to the remaining few.

In Pac-Man 99, players jump into a match, and they play like it’s a normal campaign. They munch on dots, avoid ghosts, eat Power Pellets and turn the tables on adversaries.

What’s different is that players will notice a line of ghost symbols running down two rows of the map. As Pac-Man rolls over the symbols, they’re added to the closest enemy, creating a line. If players eat an Energizer and devour the line of ghosts, they create obstacles for their competitors. It’s akin to dropping random blocks on competitors in Tetris. These can be shadowy versions of Pac-Man that slow players down so that ghosts can hunt them down. As players move up the survivor ranks, these Pac-Men turn red and will kill players if they touch them.

One of the ways to raise the odds of survival is to empty a maze of pellets raising Pac-Man’s speed. Players can also eat fruit to reset the board and add new Power Pellets if they’re getting low. The strategy is limited compared to Mega Tunnel Battle, but with only one life in a match, players will appreciate the intensity of every contest. The bigger player base also means fans can jump into games quickly when defeated.

Both Mega Battle Tunnel and Pac-Man 99 have a way of being addictively fun even when players lose. If a player is eliminated, a new match is on the horizon. It doesn’t take much to hit the retry button and hop back into a contest. Pac-Man 99’s setup excels at this while jumping into a match in "Mega Battle Tunnel" takes longer. Thankfully, the developers included computer challenges to keep players busy while they wait for people to queue up.

Pac-Man 99 is a little more fun because of its simplified gameplay and the ease of finding a match. Defeat in a battle royale game is a pain but the joy is that there’s always another chance at redemption around the corner and the more recent Pac-Man game gets it right.