Game Reviews

Pac-Chomp!

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Pac-Chomp!
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| Pac-Chomp!

Namco Bandai has been going Pac-Man crazy recently, dropping the classic gobbler into all kinds of mischief.

On the iPhone front, he was given his own spin on Doodle Jump with platform bouncer Pac'N Jump, and now he's trying his hand at iconic match-three game Bejeweled.

Pac-Chomp! offers enough variety on top of the old formula for casual players to lap it up, although a distinct lack of game modes won't keep you playing for too long.

Wakka wakka

You're presented with a grid of classic Pac-Man ghosts, and must swap adjacent ghosties around to match three or more of the same colour.

The timer at the top of the screen that is constantly going down also acts as your score bar. Match enough ghosts in a row to gain a meaty combo, and the bar will max out, allowing you to progress to the next level.

Sounds simple enough, but a number of clever twists mean that the action is fresher than you might first think.

Each corner of the grid can be rotated, enabling you to move ghosts around more freely. However, if you rotate a corner and no matches are made, the timer will decrease dramatically.

Gobble gobble

Each grid also has the main man himself somewhere in it. Match four or five ghosts together, and special power-ups will appear that Pac-Man can eat if he's directly adjacent to them.

Power-ups cause multiple ghosts in the grid to explode, and grant you big points. However, there is one power-up in particular that you really want to gobble down.

Make Pac-Man eat a Power Pill (match five to generate these tablets) and all the ghosts will turn blue. You'll then have 15 seconds to swipe Pac-Man around the screen, eating all the ghosts and bagging some serious points.

All this makes for some great match-three gameplay, which feels varied enough to elevate it above a simple Bejeweled clone.

More more!

If the game only provided more game modes and more of an incentive to keep playing, we wouldn't be able to put it down.

Normal mode is your standard gameplay, while Hardcore mode makes the timer elapse faster. The final mode, Scramble, has a set time limit and the game ends after that.

You'll play the game modes available for a couple of hours but perhaps then never come back to it. If there were online highscore boards, we'd definitely want to beat our ranks and other players, but these are currently missing in action.

Pac-Chomp! is a great and unique twist on the match-three genre, but ultimately it all ends far sooner than we would have hoped.

Pac-Chomp!

Pac-Chomp! may be a little light on content, but it's still one of the more interesting match-three games available on iPhone
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Mike Rose
Mike Rose
An expert in the indie games scene, Mike comes to Pocket Gamer as our handheld gaming correspondent. He is the author of 250 Indie Games You Must Play.