Pac-Man World Rally

Pac-Man World Rally Review

Turning kid-friendly platformers into kid-friendly kart racing games is hardly anything new, and with Namco Bandai's attempts in the last several years to merge everyone's favorite power-pill junkie into a bona fide platforming franchise with the Pac-Man World games, it's predictable that we now find ourselves with Pac-Man World Rally. This boilerplate kart racer borrows liberally from Nintendo's Mario Kart series, though it does try to toss in a couple of Pac-centric gameplay concepts to give the game its own spin. Unfortunately, these Pac-isms do little to offset the overly familiar feel of the game, or its complete and utter lack of challenge. Of course, this last criticism is most likely because the game seems aimed very squarely at a more youthful audience. But when you consider that Pac-Man is best beloved by the older, more nostalgic gaming audience, you have to wonder why the developer would make the game so dull for anyone out of elementary school.

World Rally's presentation is reasonably well done, though also completely devoid of unique qualities. This game looks like every other brightly colored, wacky-themed kart racer ever made, with tracks themed after ghost houses, volcanoes, jungles, deserts, snowy mountains, and the like. A few quirky tracks do end up in the fold, such as a tabletop Pac-Man-game-themed track, and even a Katamari Damacy-themed level, but these are some of the lamest and least enjoyable tracks to drive around, despite the neat thematic qualities. The Katamari track has next to nothing to it beyond a rolling katamari to avoid from time to time, and the tabletop track is so overwrought with annoying turns that you have to wonder how anyone thought this would be fun. The graphics are, at the very least, crisp and colorful, and on the PlayStation 2 and GameCube, the game runs very smoothly. The PSP version, however, runs at about 15 frames a second at all times and looks choppy no matter where you are or what you do. The graphics are nearly as clean looking on the PSP as they are in the console versions, but perhaps a few sacrifices to up the frame rate would have helped matters here. The game's audio is made up of plenty of cartoonish music, including several variations on the Pac-Man theme and some goofy sound effects, some of which are decent and some of which are repetitive and grating.

In the end, Pac-Man World Rally simply has nothing unique, special, or fun about it. It's a serviceable training-wheels rendition of a kart racer for that younger audience, but for anybody looking for more than a quickly beaten game, look elsewhere.

Gamespot