PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+ isn't a remake of the old arcade classic; In some ways it's true that it's a score attack game with simple mechanics, but at its core, I would rather say that PMCEDX+ is a puzzle game. With very few randomness in some instances, there's an 'ideal' path to beat many stages of this psychedelic frenzied game. Even with randomness and some weird issues here and there's it's a really good time.
Through a variety of stages, this game has a few goals, either get the maximum points you can in a 5 or 10 minutes limit, eat as many ghosts in one go or try and complete the mazes as fast as possible. As you collect dots, eat ghosts and fruits and progress through the levels, the speed goes up until it plateaus at 50. Every time you die or use bombs, it goes down. This game isn't fun at speed level 1, it only happens at the beginning of score rounds, but boy do you want it to pick it up, maybe it should start you at 5?
Some of the interface stuff is weird in PMCEDX+. I really love how it shows your rank on the global leaderboards and gives you a grade (From S to E) depending on where you are in scores. It's really satisfying to be 80 out of 700, in some cases, and you know how you did compared to everybody else that tried this perticular level. The "Comparison with Friends" interface the game throws at you when you launch it tho, pretty useless, especially because it shows you all of your friends, not only the ones that own the game, and you get medals for sharing your achievements on facebook, great.
To summarize the game quickly, you eat all the dots on one side of the screen to reveal a fruit on the other side that changes the layout and adds more dots. Sleepy ghosts will begin chasing you like a long deadly tail, some random ghosts will just roam the map in semi-random pattern (as-in, I can't really predict them, but they always seem to be the same) whenever you grab a power pellet you can eat ghosts to rack up increasing amount of points, up to 3200 per ghost and some ghosts carry more pellets to extend your power-up duration or even bombs. When you get too close to enemies, the game slows down so you can react or use bombs, a bomb will send all the random ghosts plus the ghosts following you in the middle of the screen. Whether you're going for points or time, it's very fun.
The gripes I have with the game are very small. First of all, I don't like how the ghosts you bomb behave. The bomb is supposed to help you avoid dying, but in many cases, the train of ghosts will come back from the center of the screen and beeline to tail you again, not by following your movements but by using the shortest route. In some cases that means you'll need to use a bomb again to avoid a head-on collision, you need to think of where you'll be in a few seconds before you bomb.
Second of all, the slow-down mechanic is a bit too easy to trigger. I really love how most of the times you can move in another direction to avoid being killed but sometimes the game will make you rethink about where you are without reason. The hitboxes are smaller than some sprites are, so you'll learn after playing for a while what's too close and what's fine. The game, however, should know that you can make that turn without the use of slowdown.
Finally, I think the random roaming ghosts get hard to differentiate from normal ones after the speed picks up and there are more than one or two on-screen. The pure puzzle aspect of PMCEDX+ leaves when roaming ghosts come into play, and that's fine. After a while, the roaming ghosts might join the ghost train if they get drawn into it, but with the speed this game goes, they should be easier to spot. That's why I used the Dig-Dug theme whenever I had to play for a while; the pookas and the frygars are really easy to tell apart (and the music is great).
If you haven't played PMCEDX+, I think it's worth a try.