"Not as good as the original"

Story
The magic fruit has been stolen by the ghosts and it has unleashed a very evil ghost who was locked away under the tree. It's up to Pac-MaN to get the fruit back and lock the evil ghost back up. It's you basic platformer story but it seems too basic. I give story a 6/10



Control
You have a very limited amount of moves. Jump, jump kick, butt bounce and rev. It's very easy to get use to them. The problem is that if you have played different platformers (Sonic) you will become annoyed that hitting jump after reviving off a ramp drops you but the dropping thing is needed in later stages. The camera is a pain to control and it locks itself way too much. The control doesn't always do what you want either. A lot of the time when I tried to butt bounce it wouldn't work! I give control a 6/10



Voice Acting, Sound Effects and Music
The voice acting is pretty good but it's hardly used. The sound effects are good and the sounds from the arcade games return but thats a problem. A person can only stand small douses of dot munching sounds. The music is classic Pac-Man and sounds great. If your a fan of Pac-Man, you should get some enjoyment out of the uses of the classic sounds, I give voice acting, sound effects and music a 8/10



Game play
For the most part you get a platformer but a few stages are slightly different. The stages start out short and easy and get harder and a lot longer. If you just want to finish the game you can rush right through the stages but to unlock the Pac-Man arcade games and new mazes you will need to find certain items. Most of the time they are right in the open but some are way too hard to get. In the first stage (Pac Village) there is a token on top of a very high tree, this blasted thing took me a hour to figure out how to get. Some items match into the background, so you end up missing them. The enemies are pretty lame and can die in 1-2 hits. You can only kill ghosts when you eat a power dot and if you touch a ghost without having ate a power pellet you die. The bosses suck. Half of the are basicly the same thing and some are so freaking hard even when you know their moves. They are only hard cause you have to hit a very exact spot and if your even slightly off (land right beside it) you miss and you will probably fall to your death. Falls are how you die 98% of the time. I died so many times from falls that it isn't even funny. It's always the cameras fault cause you never get a good angle and on a good amount of parts you can't move it. There are a couple mini game type missions like ice skating (best stage in the game), using a sub, racing from a snowball, swimming and inline skating but most are pretty boring. I give game play a 6/10



Replay Value
At least Namco got something right. There is a ton of stuff to find which unlocks new mazes which are funner than rest of the game. You can also unlock the following arcade games. Pac-Man, Pac Attack, Sound Test (not really a game), Pac Mania and MRs. Pac-Man. You can also unlock the gallery to look at different ideas they had for the game but it moves by itself and you have to wait for what seems like forever for the pictures to change. The game is very addictive and I had trouble putting it down. I give replay value a 8/10



Final Score
I give Pac-Man World 2 a 6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/12/07

Game Release: Pac-Man World 2 (US, 02/24/02)