One of my favorite PlayStation games back in the day was *Pac-Man World*, and the remake of that a few years ago was a blast. I wasn’t as familiar with the sequel, but for obvious reasons, the thing about the *Re-PAC* version that most caught my attention was its bizarre crossover DLC with *Sonic the Hedgehog*.
Now, said DLC is finally out, so I dove head-first into the latest celebration of Pac-Man’s 45th birthday (good lord). I spent a few hours decorating the Pac-Village with Sonic character statues and tackling the surprisingly challenging levels added to the arcade. It’s a confusing slice of content—not just because of the crossover’s inherent novelty, but because of how intensely dedicated the gameplay is to its concept on a design level.
If you snag the DLC for yourself, Pac-Man gets a letter from his boy Sonic wishing him a happy birthday. The blue blur speeds by to drop off some presents, then vanishes to go back to his Hollywood-funded condo in LA or something. The gifts include a new Sonic costume for Pac-Man, a gashapon machine with Sonic-themed statues to unlock (these are silly, but the machines being accurately modeled based on Bandai Namco’s real-life gashapon gimmicks is a neat touch), and a brand-new arcade machine containing three bonus stages.
There are two levels that mash together *Pac-Man World’s* bouncy, plodding platforming cadence with contemporary (think *Sonic Generations*) speed-oriented, multi-path level design. The third level is a multi-stage bout against Dr. Eggman, and might be one of the most frustrating fights against that bulbous bastard I’ve ever experienced.
The first two levels are wild. If you think about video games as arcane software miracles—engineering and luck coming together to make fun—they’re even more impressive. What you have here is basically an exercise in entire mechanics from *Sonic* games being bolted onto an entirely different structure system that supports a wholly different set of verbs and interactions.
You’ll go from platforming segments built around what *Pac-Man World 2* is, decorated like a Sonic game, to full-on Sonic pieces like boost pad pathways that send Pac-Man through lines of enemies and rings. These lead into loops and spit him out into open-air spaces that ask you to make snap decisions in choosing between different route options. These moments shift perspective over Pac-Man’s shoulder, alter the controls to feel more like Sonic, and somehow feel like seamless pieces of the overall stage structure.
The second level even incorporates elaborate rail-grinding segments that behave exactly like they do in Sonic games. I could feel myself, as a veteran Sonic player, having to code-switch in my mind to adjust to what each piece of these levels was asking of me.
Now, this stuff wasn’t perfect. There were occasions when, almost like many normal Sonic games in the dark days of the 2000s, the level geometry and/or camera couldn’t keep up with what was being asked. Sometimes I’d fall through a level into the abyss and die, or I’d have trouble bouncing off a bumper and collecting a normal, straight line of rings. Pac-Man’s circular body seemingly struggled to adapt to Sonic logic in these cases.
These moments were few and far between, but never bared fangs as they did when it came time to battle Eggman.
The Eggman fight starts impressively, once again in how it brings Sonic level structure and gameplay logic into the *Pac-Man World* world. But once the action started, the intersection of verbs and physics between two vastly different styles began to buckle under its own weight.
Eggman’s first form is a classic encounter, flying around in his circular hovering craft and swinging a massive ball and chain at you. But between the camera snapping to follow Eggman and some gnarly tracking and collision, avoiding damage seemed impossible at first. Pac-Man isn’t a speedy guy, and he can’t jump so high either without his bouncing jump, which takes time Eggman isn’t affording.
You have to be perfectly precise to avoid the wrecking ball during most attacks, and there’s another one that’s almost literally impossible to dodge unless you use Pac-Man’s boost move at just the right moment. It was annoying as hell, especially since I hadn’t played the game in a while, and my brain wasn’t suggesting to use the boost at all.
I tried every variation of getting out of the way I could think of and was taking free damage like an idiot. Once I remembered the boost, I got through, but it was such a restrictive aspect of the fight that it still wasn’t satisfying to win.
Eggman’s next two forms were much more forgiving and leaned even further into Sonic-style mechanics taking over Pac-Man like a brain worm.
Phase two was an auto-scroller where you avoid bombs, spikes, pits, and a moving buzzsaw, while kicking bombs back at Eggman.
Phase three was a showdown with Eggman in a giant mech suit in a circulating, 3D arena—a cornerstone of any modern Sonic game. That one had its frustrating incompatibilities with Pac-Man’s more sluggish movement, but it was also generous in how Eggman’s arm getting caught for big damage didn’t seem to operate on a timer, letting you take your time to do the classic “run up the arm and bonk the head” maneuver.
Things like that made for a visually impressive, stress-lowering finale that ended with Sonic realizing he forgot to actually say hi before heading back to the movie set—and then coming back to help his boy Pac-Man finish the job.
“Blue Blur” is kind of what my brain feels like after experiencing what Sega and Bandai Namco cooked up for *Pac-Man World 2 Re-PAC’s* oddball *Sonic the Hedgehog* crossover DLC. The sheer ingenuity on display in the way each game’s mechanics were married across only three levels makes it feel more substantive than it actually is, which bodes well for the time trial mode and leaderboards attached.
It’s almost as impressive as this year’s DC Comics crossover with Sonic, showing that perhaps Sega is really putting muscle behind these latest cross-branding efforts. If the world around us must become more and more like *Fortnite* with each passing day, at least we’re getting stronger efforts now than simply stuffing Sonic into a *Super Monkey Ball*.
*Pac-Man World 2 Re-PAC* and its *Sonic the Hedgehog* Collaboration DLC are available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. A Switch 2 code was provided by the publisher for this feature.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146824/pac-man-world-2-sonic-dlc-impressions