Bunny Maze 3D

Even 30 years after first arriving in arcades, Pac-Man has never truly embraced 3D.

Regardless of technological trends, its gameplay has always been best served by a top-down 2D perspective. Even relatively recent releases, such as the excellent Pac-Man Championship Edition, have refined the existing formula rather than attempting to crowbar in an extra dimension.

Nobody wants another Pac-Man World, after all.

So we approach Bunny Maze 3D - a 3D arcade maze game with a third-person perspective - with some caution. Can it succeed where Pac-Man has only ever failed?

Bunny Maze 3D casts you as a furry victim of organised crime on a single-minded quest to recover his carrot hoard from an army of rather nasty rabbits - the clunnies.

In each level your objective is to retrieve your scattered veg from increasingly complex mazes while avoiding the attention of the wandering clunny sentries. Once you've collected your stolen goods or simply run out of time the level ends.

But playing from a third-person perspective makes navigating these mazes needlessly tricky. Bulky decorative scenery often obscures your view of the action, while the behind-the-character camera makes hunting down carrots in each level a bit of a guessing game.

Without the bird's-eye overview of each maze afforded to you by the likes of Pac-Man, the decision to turn left or right is a random, rather than strategic, one. Avoiding sentries is often down to luck rather than skill.

The scoring system is similarly muddled. Finding all of the carrots on a level is seemingly no guarantee of a perfect three-star rating, while failing to collect them all doesn't necessarily mean you'll receive less than full marks.

Exactly how your rating is calculated is not transparent or explained, and you're left to guess how to improve past performances.

Charming touches protrude from the tangle of odd decisions, though. The sight of villainous quay-side clunnies dressed in striped full-body bathing suits and scuba gear raised a chuckle from us, and generally the game's colourful visuals lend the Bunny Maze 3D a vivid, cartoonish feel.

But, overall, Bunny Maze 3D's gameplay lacks the clarity and strategy of genre benchmarks, offering plenty of inoffensive competence without any excellence.