A former Stadia exclusive comes to PC and consoles this week, and it’s a blast
06.05.2024 - 11:09
/ digitaltrends.com
/ Mega Tunnel Battle
/ Giovanni Colantonio
If you’re a fan of Pac-Man, you’re in luck. On May 9, Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs (not the catchiest name, is it?) hits PC and all major consoles. The online-only multiplayer release is a battle royale game where 64 players fight to survive across interconnected mazes. It’s a chaotic use of the Pac-Man formula that fans of the series should enjoy.
If all of this sounds oddly familiar, it’s because the game originally launched nearly four years ago … as a now-lost Google Stadia exclusive.
Originally released on November 17, 2020, Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle was touted as one of Stadia’s key exclusives. Like so many other games, it was nearly lost to time when Stadia shuttered on January 18, 2023. Since it was a true exclusive for the service, it seemed like fans would never get a chance to play it again. Thankfully, it’s back. And that’s good news, because the newly updated version is a fun multiplayer curiosity that deserved a second chance.
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In Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle, 64 players chomp through mazes simultaneously and fight to be the last Pac standing. That idea would be explored later in the Nintendo Switch exclusive Pac-Man 99 (another game that’s now defunct), but the idea is much more successful here. The big difference is that players get more opportunities to interact with one another. At different intervals, paths will open that lead to rival players’ mazes. Players can mess with one another, stealing their valuable fruits or gobbling up one another’s power pellets. It’s all a bit more tense and cutthroat than the comparatively lonelyPac-Man 99.
It’s also a bit more confusing. There’s a lot happening on screen, and the in-game tutorial only explains so much. Power-ups can appear in mazes from time to time. Some are straightforward, like an item that freezes ghosts (and any other humans in the maze) in place. Others aren’t terribly well explained, which can make early battles feel a little hectic. Its scoring system can be hard to figure out too, as it’s not initially clear if players need to get the highest score to win or survive. An odd mission system that gives players certain tasks to complete only clutters it more.
While there’s a learning curve here, Chomp Champs is good fun once you get a sense of how it all works. The core Pac-Man gameplay is as tight as it needs to be and it has a creative way of ramping up in complexity. Anytime players clear a board, the difficulty rises. The ghost AI gets smarter and the maze becomes trickier to navigate. That