Pac-Man World 3 (DS)

Pac-Man World 3
System: Nintendo DS
Genre: 3D Platformer
Developer: HumanSoft
Publisher: Namco
Release: 2005



Pac-Man World 3 is a hard game to review. At first, the game does so many things wrong that it would be easy to write it off as crap, but as the game progresses it manages to improve in some aspects. It basically boils down to whether or not suffering through the first half of the game is worth it to play the later half. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

First off, some background. Pac-Man World 3 for the DS was released about a year after the handheld's debut. The game's story involves Pac-Man trying to celebrate his 25th birthday when all of a sudden he's teleported away in an attempt to save both Pac-Land and the Spectral Realm from an evil genius named Erwin. Unfortunately, the game really suffers in the story department since most of these story details can only be gained from reading the instruction booklet, as the game only features still screenshots and text sequences that don't last very long and don't give nearly as much information. Another downside is that these story sequences only take place before the start of the game and after its finish, meaning there is nothing story-related throughout the majority of the game.

This leads us into the gameplay. The game features 14 levels for Pac-Man to traverse through on his journey. Each level involves Pac-Man jumping around on platforms, beating up enemies, collecting fruit, and finding keys and switches to get to the end of the level. Basically, if you've played any 3D platformer in the last ten years or so, you've played this game before. As for taking advantage of the DS hardware, this game doesn't really do it. All of the main action takes place on the top screen, leaving the touchscreen as a glorified HUD. There are a few touchscreen elements in the game, mostly involving pressing buttons and inserting keys, but it feels like the developers waited until the end to realize this was a DS game and just tacked them on afterwards. None of the touchscreen elements last longer than two seconds, and all they really do is break up the gameplay.

They seem to have waited late into the game to actually try to make something good. While the first six levels are generic and repetitive, from the seventh level on they actually managed to make a somewhat good game. They introduce more new enemies, a new power-up, and the stages get less repetitive. If most of the levels were like this, the game would have been better overall, but getting half the game right just isn't enough. And even though the later levels are better, they still don't rise above your average platforming fare.

The graphics aren't really that good. While they managed to pull off some good 3D graphics for a DS game, they're bogged down by drab looking colors and textures. There are also lots of technical flaws in the design, such as invisible walls and see-through character models. It also doesn't help that the game seems to use the same four types of levels over and over again. The music is even worse, as it doesn't really fit the mood of the game at all, and also features several tracks being used over and over again throughout the entire game. The sound effects are about the only saving grace in the audio department, as most of them feature classic Pac-Man ditties that fans will recognize.

There is a big problem in the game in the form of glitches, the most confusing ones having to do with the health bar. Numerous times falling into holes led to gaining lives back instead of losing them, and sometimes getting a health wedge refills your entire health bar instead of just one piece of it as it's supposed to. There are a few other minor glitches as well, but none of them affecting the gameplay as much as these two. Though they seem good in theory, they make the game, which is already on the easy side, even easier, almost eliminating any challenge the game has. It is almost impossible to die in this game, whether you are trying to or not.

The game features a few extras, all of which are accessible through the main menu at the start of the game. There's a bonus VR Maze that you get for collecting all the fruit in a level, but since you can play it at anytime from these Extras it makes the whole concept pretty useless. The only other extra you get is an interview with creator of Pac-Man, Toru Iwatani, but the quality of this is just as terrible as the rest of the cutscenes in the game, and you can probably find any useful info in this interview on the internet.

In the end, Pac-Man World 3 doesn't offer anything new to the world of platformers, and it doesn't do that good a job of doing the old stuff either. With so many better platformers available on the Nintendo DS, there really is no reason to play this, even for long time Pac-Man fans. If for some reason you really want to play this game though, at least pick up one of the console versions, which I hear is somewhat better than what is offered here.

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Good review. =) Those glitches sound pretty rad. I played this on Xbox and wasn't too impressed. I'm surprised that they bothered cramming it into the DS!

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