"A fun game that frustrates in short order"

I'm going to start out by saying that I was truly excited for this game. And when I picked up the game, popped it into my DS, and started it up, I had a good few hours of fun with it. Some parts of those hours were a little frustrating, but nothing that I wasn't prepared for. Toward the end of the game though, I feared I might lose a stylus. I wanted the game to get hard, but I never felt like it was my lack of skill that prevented me from advancing. Moreover, a lack of gestures (what the game calls the drawing maneuvers you perform to make the various shapes) being accepted by the game was what usually caused my downfall.

Graphics - 10/10

They're simple, but there's certainly nothing wrong with them. What happens to be right with them is how silly they are. There is a certain novelty in drawing a Pac-man that's shaped like a fish and has a horn. Or drawing a Pac-man so large he encompasses the entire screen. But I digress. It's hard for me to say anything bad about the graphics in the game except that, for the most part, they're simple. Sometimes simple is good.

Sound – 7/10

The sound isn't displeasing, but it isn't exciting. Playing it with the sound off will make you just as happy as playing it with the sound on. I scored it as high as I did because even if you have the sound on, the repetitive sound effects don't wear on your nerves as much as some games' might.

Gameplay – 5/10 – 10/10

Here's where the game got up and fell down for me, all at the same time. The game was a lot of fun; I'm not going to say otherwise. When I first started out, the frantic nature of drawing Pac-man and keeping him on the screen was enough to keep me entertained. The first boss battle was highly enjoyable. But then they added another gesture in. And no matter how perfectly I drew the arrow, it wouldn't materialize. The most effective way I found to make the gesture take, more often than not, was to do a loop for the arrowhead and continue the gesture into the shaft. Then they gave me bombs, though. Now some of my arrows are turning into bombs and some of my bombs, amazingly enough, are turning into arrows. And what I was finding about the bomb gesture, I think, was that it was too similar to the Pac-man gesture. If the bomb gesture had a slight dent in it, the game treated it like a bad Pac-man and erased it, regardless of whether or not it was a good bomb. The later stages get a little upsetting when you spent five or ten minutes getting through the five pages to the boss and then end up losing to the boss because you didn't figure out what you were supposed to do in time. This is upsetting not because you start back at the boss, but back at the beginning of the chapter. You don't even get a score for the chapter if you don't clear it. Overall, the game went from fun to annoying, to a little frustrating, to being out of the DS and replaced again by Polarium.

Story – N/A

I'm not going to degrade the score of this game because it had a bad story. When was the last time you sat down to play a Pac-man game and wanted to be engrossed in the story? This game could have skipped the story and just given me the game and I would have been equally happy.

Replay value – 5/10

If you can get past the faults in the gestures systems and have no problem with doing the same thing again on Hard mode, that's what's in store for you. The ghosts are faster, and some of them get an extra speed boost on top of that. Some of the ghosts, like the barrier ghosts, will do sudden turns as they move, making them much harder to eat. Also, there are collectible cards that you acquire based on the ranking you get for a level. Each level has 1 – 3 cards set at a specific score level. The only way to know is to find out. The cards don't do anything, however. They're mostly for the people that already wanted to improve their scores. Now they have incentive. I gave this a 5 out of 10 because it didn't do it for me. But it will definitely do it for someone that wants to improve their score.

Overall – 6/10

I'd weight gameplay more heavily than the rest of them. That is, of course, why you got the game to begin with. At $30, it's not a bad price. I only got a few hours of enjoyment out of it, though. So, if you're looking for something that's going to last you a while and you're not someone that likes to sit and improve your score over and over, this game may not be for you. If you're a score fiend, however, this will be right up your alley. I'd recommend checking out some of the other DS titles like Warioware: Touched, Feel the Magic: XY/XX and Polarium before checking out this title.

Bottom line: Get it if you'll enjoy improving your score for hours on end. Otherwise, see if you can borrow from a friend for a while. $30 isn't a bad price for games these days, anyway.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/04/05