The ease of control makes for some close calls as you learn how much room you’ll need to be able to squeeze past a ghost on your way to reward. Players however will still find enough time to take detours out of the way to collect fruit, power pellets and the newly included power-ups (more on those later).

A wall of garbled characters threatens to swallow all in its path if you take too much time progressing forwards through the maze, much the same as the avalanche in Ski Safari, or the End of Time in Time Surfer. The inclusion of the modern mobile mechanic is given context by making the famous level 256 glitch the enemy from which you run. The top-down isometric view from Crossy Road also suits our pellet munching friend, as he weaves endlessly from bottom left to top right, with the option of being able to play in both landscape and portrait mode on your iDevice being a welcome inclusion.Įndless running as opposed to levels actually make a great fit for PAC-MAN in 2015.

A nice touch - and one which adds to the authentic PAC-MAN feel - is the fact that once on the move along a corridor, you can swipe in your intended direction before reaching the next intersection or corner, meaning PAC-MAN will continue on instead of stopping dead and lying prone to prowling ghosts. The touchscreen directional swiping that guides your Crossy Road avatar has made the transition, and works just as well navigating mazes as it does the perils of roads and rivers. So how did the partnership of studios Hipster Whale and 3 Sprockets - no doubt under the watchful eye of IP owner Bandai Namco - do? Is PAC-MAN relevant again, or should the makers of Crossy Road and Cubemen be looking for day jobs?įor those familiar with Crossy Road (and there are a lot of you out there), it’s not a huge leap to imagine the pattern of thoughts that led to PAC-MAN 256. We would suggest Mario, Space Invaders, and possibly Sonic for that short list. With Internet rage on a constant hair trigger, even a slight misstep in the treatment of such an icon could mean a career killer - and the list of competitors occupying the same lofty tier of reverence as PAC-MAN are few. It takes a pretty big pair of power pellets to take on the task of reinventing an icon of gaming history.

Crossy road pac-man ghosts