Pac-Mania

For a gaming legend, Pac-Man's been pretty quiet lately. But now he's back.

Luckily, he's not been using his time away to change from his happy, pellet-munching form into something 'darker', à la Bomberman. Nah, he's still the same old yellow blob with a big gob that we all remember and love, albeit here he turns up in an isometric maze, not the old-skool 2D ones we played all those years ago when we should have been at school.

That's because Pac-Mania on the mobile is actually based on the last Pac-Man arcade game released in 1987 by Namco. So it's got the aforementioned 3D looking mazes, a whopping seven ghosts and Pac-Man comes complete with the ability to jump.

To begin with, though, it's really business as usual. If you've come from another planet, that means you guide Pac-Man around a maze, munching up pellets and hunting down the 'power pills' when the ghosts start to catch up with you. A power pill turns the tables on Blinky and co, of course, giving you a limited time (which gets increasingly shorter as you progress through the levels) to either chase down the ghosts and give them a taste of their own mean Pac-eating medicine for points, or to just quickly gobble up a load of tricky pellets while you're invulnerable.

When all the pellets on the level have been eaten, you move on to the next level. Thankfully, the stages you've unlocked are then selectable on the main menu screen, so there's no going all the way back to the start once you've lost all of your three lives. The levels are fairly varied, moving from a colourful Lego-looking Block Town, to a maze made of little pyramids, to the multi-tiered Jungly Steps (fortunately you can't fall off these, even if they look precarious).

Once you've seen the main four types of level, the rest of the 18 plus levels are essentially just variants on these themes, but pretty ones nonetheless.

Being in 3D certainly makes the game look even better than its previous two-dimensional incarnations, but in practice the view isn't as useful as a 2D view. Squashed onto the mobile screen, it means you can see very little of the maze at a time, so the gameplay can get slightly compromised.

This means you don't always know where the remaining pellets are, so have to make dangerous trips back around the maze to find them. And as you're trying to avoid seven ghosts at a time, it's all too easy to get blocked in by them just because you aren't able to see them coming.

Then again, the jump ability means you can get out of sticky situations, but Pac is a slow jumper so getting used to the timing is crucial.

On top of the basic pellet-eating and greedy ghost avoidance, there are various bonus items that pop up in a level. There's fruit icons, usually positioned precariously close to the ghosts' central hideout, which give you extra points, while in later levels there are also special coloured pellets that earn you additional abilities.

The pink pellet, for instance, makes the ghosts vulnerable and gives you double points for each one you gobble up, whereas the green pellet makes Pac move twice as fast – very handy for evading the ghosts and getting to all the pellets. As points mean extra lives and a high score to brag about, the bonus items are well worth going for.

Pac-Mania has a good learning curve – the opening levels can be completed without even resorting to using the jump button, but later on mastering it is a must. Almost every level has a new twist, either in its design or the way the ghosts act. For instance, right from the start they tend to hunt in packs and their number means it's all too easy to get cornered. Later, they learn to jump, too, so as well as reacting to a ghost almost catching you, you then need to think about whether it is able to out jump you.

There's just one more problem that keeps the fun at less than fever pitch, and that's the controls on mobile phone. A joystick isn't always precise enough and Pac-Man often won't turn off when you want him to, resulting in untimely deaths. Opting for button control is more reliable, but also too easy to mess up in the heat of the moment. Pac-Mania is a very fast-paced game and you have split-seconds to move out of danger so it's a shame to find the controls just aren't always up to the task.

Overall though, this looks and sounds good and working your way through each maze is usually as much fun as it's always been. The Pac-Man rarely fails to deliver a simple but addictive game, and this is no exception.