Many people consider Pac-Man 99 to be the first foray that the famous character has made into the battle royale space. While it was a Switch exclusive, it was a neat twist on the battle royale formula that made for some exciting matches, but it was also easy enough to win that the population dwindled and it was discontinued over two years later. The game that was Pac-Man's initial leap into the battle royale genre was Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle, which was exclusive to the doomed Stadia streaming platform. Like a good number of Google's exclusives on the service, this title has finally made its way to other platforms with Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs.

By now, only those new to video games would be unfamiliar with the Pac-Man formula. You start in a maze filled with dots and ghosts that emerge from the center of the field. Ghosts can kill you with one touch, but you can eat a power pellet to temporarily make them susceptible to your touch, turning them into a pair of eyeballs that retreat to their base before emerging later for another go at you. Like the classic arcade game, you play until you run out of lives.

There are a number of changes made to the base gameplay so it fits with the game's multiplayer battle royale focus. For starters, there are 63 other players with the same goal of survival. Completing your maze means leveling it up, which opens up power-ups to use, like temporarily freezing your enemies or gaining a speed burst. It also resets the dots in your maze while also powering up the ghosts to make them faster, and it changes the layout of the maze to make it larger with more pathways.

That part becomes important, as each maze contains passageways that connect everyone else's mazes. You can invade other people's mazes and vice versa, and this is something you'd want to do for various reasons. Mainly, you'd want to go to another maze to hunt down another Pac-Man and eat them, causing them to lose a life and eventually eliminate them from play. The secondary objective is to complete various challenges that pop up during a match. Some might be as simple as eating pellets in another person's maze, or they may be as challenging as eating several ghosts in a maze in a row. Along with points, the objectives grant currency to unlock cosmetics for your own Pac-Man and themes for your own maze.

You can suss out a strategy from this invasion mechanic. Aside from eating other players, you can use some power-ups to either rob them of points or cause the ghosts to be more effective at trapping them. You can try to eat all of the power pellets from the playfield, and the only thing stopping you from darting quickly from maze to maze is the fact that the doors open and close on timers, so you'll need to exercise caution and some planning if you move to a new maze.

The formula seems ideal, but the execution is rather poor. For example, ranked mode is locked away until you reach a profile level of 10, but the mode plays no differently from the regular elimination mode. Some challenges fail to register at all, so you can fail them even though you did everything that was required to complete them. The game also has a tendency to not promote many of the mechanics. For example, you can stay in your own maze throughout the match, and you have a very good chance of coming away the winner even without encountering another Pac-Man. Winning rarely feels like something you earn, and once you discover that the bonuses for completing challenges aren't that great, you'll never find the incentive to go after them again.

The biggest blow is its lack of online players. There's no offline mode, so you need to be a PlayStation Plus member to even get past the title screen. While you can always get into a match, you'll never face a real-life human being because the player pool shrank very shortly after the game launched. You'll always get matches filled with bots, and although you aren't spending time sitting around the lobby waiting for a match to start, it means that matches aren't challenging since the CPU players aren't competitive. Most of them stay in their own mazes or go after each other while leaving you alone. In short, there's no incentive to keep playing once you've experienced a few matches.

The overall presentation is fine. The polygonal Pac-Man and ghosts look decent, but the animations for Pac-Man's chomping can sometimes look odd. The environments can look cool if you're willing to spend in-game currency to make them reminiscent of other Bandai Namco titles, but they aren't so garish that you'll lose sight of the important features. The music is decent, and while the soundtrack tries to incorporate the signature parts of the original theme, none of the tracks are memorable.

It's difficult to muster up any excitement for Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs. The formula is decent, but the lackadaisical AI doesn't encourage you to play with the parts of the game that make it distinct. The lack of other modes makes this package feel expensive, while the lack of any human players this early on robs the game of any reason to keep playing. It's a dead game that makes you wish that Bandai Namco would resurrect Pac-Man 99 instead.

Score: 4.0/10