Pac-Man Fever

"A very frustrating, yet somewhat good party game"

Intro: Many people call this game "a Mario Party rip-off." In which I suppose it is similar, except not. Let me explain a little more.

Graphics: 9/10 Pretty good. Pac Man looks cheesy (literally), and you can write home to your friends how good Astroth's ax looks. You can tell how much time the creators of this game took to do the graphics in this game.

Audio: 7/10 It is very easy to hear a torpedo shoot out of a boat (no, really, that is a minigame), but the thing is, it doesn't sound that good. The sound and music is a mixed bag of good and bad. Probably about 51% bad. I think I'm giving the score a bit to high. But hey, I'm a nice guy; that stuff happens.

Control: 9/10 Very well done! Of coarse, this is a party game, so it isn't that hard to control, but that isn't ever a bad thing. Not much to do in the control department, actually: move left and right in some minigames, and maybe the occasional "Hit the A button now, stupid!" type of things.

Gameplay: 7/10 Well, this game isn't a complete rip-off of Mario Party. However, I think maybe they should have tried for that....Anyway, let me break it down here.
You get a total of 6 characters to choose from, and they all range from most of the games Namco's shoved down our throats for the past couple years. At the beginning of every turn, you play a minigame. A plus that they did better than Mario Party is that instead of wasting ten minutes with the roulette spinning around choosing a minigame, this just pops right up and goes to the "How to Play" screen. A thing they did worse from MP was instead of rolling a die, how many spaces you go depends on how well you did in the minigame. While this adds excitement to the minigame, it is just way to random. And instead of hitting dice to determine who goes first, the order it is depends on what control socket you are in. Example: If you play with controller 1, your character would go first. While some people may like that, I personally don't. But however! This game falls to the exact same thing Mario Party does: it doesn't matter who you pick. Like if you were Pac Man, you would be better at games where you must collect something, but not as good in hand to hand fights. I just think stuff like that would have been cool. Anyway, you and three other people (just like MP, you must always have four characters) must waddle around a board trying to reach the end first. However, there are many traps along the way, like a reverse tile, that makes you go backwards. Something bothers me right here. It's too random. You could be in the lead one minute, and the next, you are all the way back to start! It's too random for my liking. And also once you reach the end, there are these things called "Raffles." What you do here is a wheel spins around and around and lands on somebody. Whoever that is, gets a raffle ticket, which in turn lets you buy minigames at the end. That's right, instead of unlocking them simply by playing them, you got to BUY them. WHY, do I ask you?! This adds so much more unnecessary time. Also when your at the end on the "raffle squares," you must place in a certain...umm...place. Example: if your are on the Orange Raffle Square, you must place atleast 2nd to move onto the Banana square. I apologize if that was confusing, but so is this game. However, it isn't like it's bad.

Replayability: 6/10 Not as good as it should be. Since you have to buy minigames, it just adds way too much time, and therefore repels you from playing it again. You only pick this game up from the shoebox every once in awhile, but you do sort of enjoy it. However, with only 6 characters, you feel that the should have spent that extra $300 to spruce up this game alittle bit.

Final Verdict: Buy/Rent I can't really tell you which one to do. If you like Party games, buy it, but I wouldn't spend anymore than $20 on it. If you think you like party games, rent it. And if you can't make up your mind between Mario Party 4 (it's probably the cheapest, newest MP game) and Pac Man Fever, go with MP4. You'll probably enjoy it more. Not saying to shove this game away, I'm just saying that Mario Party is probably the better choice between the two.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/07/05