2.5/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of Pac-Man World 2.

Platform: GameCube (played on Wii) Time Played: ~10 hours Status: Beaten Have you ever played a game that's so bland, empty, and boring, that you get physically sick playing it, twice? Well, that was Pac-Man World 2 for me. The game isn't even all that bad, but god could it get boring and drag on for far longer than necessary Pac-Man World 2 improves on its predecessor's formula a good bit in terms of actual gameplay and control. Pac-Man himself now controls a lot more fluid, and his controls are tighter than ever. So controlling Pac-Man isn't much of an issue at all. What was the biggest issue in the game for me was the camera, and my god does it suck. There are so many instances in the game where you are unable to see the platform that's ahead of you, so you have to fight with the camera in order to finally push it in the right way so that you can finally see where you're going. And forget trying to use it to look around the area with the camera, because that is a chore itself. There's a small sign at the bottom of the screen indicating when camera controls are automatically turned on and off, with the player having no control over when this happens. The camera normally follows Pac-Man and does work well on its own 70% of the time, but that other 30% that takes place in cramped areas, or when you're required to go backward and the screen won't turn around, was enough to ruin a lot of the experience. The levels in this game are also so generic and bland. I know I complained that in Pac-Man World 1 that the levels had no real cohesion and you just went from random world theme to random world theme, but at least each one was original and had its own unique ideas. In this game, we have a grass world, forest world, ice world, lava world, and a dark dimly lit ghost world. The levels themselves range from okay to dogshit. One of the worst levels is Magma Opus, a fairly decent level until you get to a random sliding section at the end, which is seemingly harmless until the very last slope in the series of said slopes has such a hard turn to make that it's much easier if you just pull a speedrun glitch. There's an entire section of water levels, two of which have Pac-Man swimming through obstacles such as underwater enemies and mines, and those levels are fine; but the one ten-minute (that's without dying) auto-run submarine level drained pretty much all of the life out of me. That shit took so fucking long. And THEN there was the final level, an extremely dark maze that's set in a swamp/bog, where you just have to find your way to the correct path that leads to a button that opens up more correct paths. The only problem is that the area is so dark, that sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the shit-brown platforms that you're standing on, or the shit-brown swamp water that's next to it. All of these three levels I mentioned each took a total of at least thirty minutes to complete, which was way too long. Not to mention that pretty much all of the bosses suck massive balls except for the first one, which is a giant mechanical frog, which actually has a creative way of defeating it. Besides that, the rest are literally carbon copies of the same boss. The final boss isn't fun, the submarine boss is boring. There is some fun to be had in this game but it just barely shines through with the rest of the crap. This game gets a lot of praise as being the best 3D platformer that Pac-Man has to offer, but as it stands now, the original Pac-Man World is overall leaps and bounds better than this, even despite that game's downsides. The plot of Pac-Man World 1 is much more original, entertaining, and cute than anything this game has to offer; and Toc-Man is a much more creative villain than Spooky. On top of all of this, collecting anything in any of the levels is rendered practically useless due to how the collectibles are used and set up. The only purpose of the Pac-Dots and Fruits is to gain 100% completion in a level so that you can get a bonus Medal for doing so (there are also eight Medals just casually hidden throughout every level). If you missed a single thing in a level, that renders everything you collected and went out of your way useless, and if you really did want to collect every Medal or to 100% of the game, you'd have to play through the level all over again just to probably miss something else. Pac-Man World 1 handled things much better by having Fruit unlock doors that contained other collectibles, or switches to open up pathways. I said in my last review that I'd never recommend Pac-Man World 1 to anyone, but I will always make sure to tell people to steer away from Pac-Man World 2, due to its sheer lack of polish, entertainment, and overall fun. I really meant it at the start of the review when I said that this game made me physically sick two separate times due to how boring and draining it was to play. Honestly, I can just see this game being so much better if they just stuck with the horizontal level structure of the first game, and just kept the same gameplay and control from this one. That'd be a match made in heaven. But Pac-Man World 3 throws all of that out the door, so unless Pac-Man World Re-Pac sells well, I don't think we'll ever see a better 3D Pac-Man platformer reach the heights it could have. Don't play this game, I don't know how it gets so much praise.