PacMan Survivors Review – A Wasted Potential

Step right up, players. In the ever-expanding graveyard of ‘survivor’ clones, I will look at PacMan Survivors – a game that treats Bandai Namco’s legendary icon with all the grace of a hit-and-run driver. Marketed with a baffling ‘Touhou’ tag, presumably because both involve things moving on a screen, this experience is less of a game and more of a technical failure. From its broken, poorly-looped audio to a movement glitch that requires a full browser refresh just to gain control, it’s a masterclass in the bare minimum. It’s a project that doesn’t just lack polish; it lacks a fundamental understanding of how a video game is supposed to function without falling apart at the seams after five minutes of play.

Gameplay

They called this title PacMan Survivors, but it’s got as much to do with Pac-Man as a bologna sandwich has to do with space travel. It’s a clone of Asteroids with no mechanics from the actual Pac-Man game. That’s it. You move around in a void, shooting at ghosts that don’t have the decency to flicker. They don’t chase you – they just drive toward you like they’re bored out of their minds.

You’re supposed to kill golden ghosts to get upgrades, but the upgrades just make you shoot in a different direction. It lacks essential genre features such as auto-firing, an experience system, and a healthbar. When you lose a life, you just remain in that same position. You can beat the entire game in five minutes, and your reward is a textbox in French telling you the boss is dead. If you don’t understand the language, you won’t be able to read the surrender note!

Not to mention the bugs too. If you die, the game doesn’t reset – it just gets faster and harder until Pac-Man is vibrating off the screen and becomes a blur of yellow and ghosts. You have to physically reach out and mash the F5 key just to make the game playable again. Additionally, if you hold the shift key, it can cause your character to move perpetually in one direction until the page is refreshed. It’s a broken and lazy nightmare that belongs in a landfill next to E.T.

Graphics

The graphics look like someone threw some paint on a Commodore 64 and called it “art.” It looks basic and unpolished – Pac-Man himself is just his classic yellow circle with a mouth. If you even call it that, the ghosts look like they were drawn by a toddler with a grudge. It’s supposed to be a survival game, but the background is just a black void. It’s like they forgot to put the actual game in the game! Forget about the GUI. If you aren’t playing on a screen the size of a movie theatre, the text just overlaps and smashes together into an unreadable mess of French garbage. It’s lazy, ugly, and it makes my eyes feel like they’ve been scrubbed with steel wool. I’ve seen more visual fidelity in a bowl of alphabet soup.

Audio

The soundtrack is an insult to every eardrum on the planet. There is only one song in the entire game, and it doesn’t even loop properly. It’s like Hong Kong ’97 – a game with only a single song that loops nonstop. As with said game, there are no sound effects either. This means no waka-waka, be-oop-be-oop when you die, not even a pathetic pop when you shoot a ghost. It’s like playing a game in a sensory deprivation tank, except instead of relaxing, you’ll end up getting more and more angered. It’s a near-silent and totally broken auditory disaster. I’d rather record the audio onto a mini vinyl record and throw it in a paper shredder.

Other Problems

First of all, the game never tells you what to do, and the lack of tutorials makes it difficult to learn how to play. Second, the localization is a tactical joke. It’s only in French, and why? Are they trying to surrender to quality? And lastly, one of the tags is misleading – they slapped ‘Touhou’ onto this pile of garbage just to trick people into clicking it. While it does have part of the gameplay for the boss, none of the characters, locations, or music appear in-game. In short, it’s a five-minute tech demo that was abandoned before it was even finished. I’d rather eat a raw cactus while sitting in a bathtub of vinegar than deal with the bugs for one more second.

Redeeming Qualities

A Pac-Man-themed survivor title may be a brilliant idea on paper, with the core gameplay loop fitting the Vampire Survivors formula perfectly. The tragedy isn’t that the idea is bad, but this specific execution missed an open goal. The bugs and interface text can be unintentionally hilarious. The fact the game only speaks French at the beginning and very end can be a humorous punchline about the player’s struggle.

The best thing I can say about this game is that, given it’s a browser game, it didn’t cost me a cent to play, though I still feel like I’m owed a refund for the electricity my monitor wasted displaying it. It serves as a perfect what not to do manual for independent developers, including basic feedback, hit markers, input handling (particularly to prevent the perpetual motion shift key bug), and resolution scaling so the GUI elements don’t overlap onto the playing field.

My Verdict

Based on the absolute technical wreckage I just described above, this game lands firmly in the Major Code Red Category. On a scale of 10, I give it a 1.5. Some of the factors that would be in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde territory are this game’s fundamental breakdown in basic playability. The game-breaking speed bug that requires a manual browser refresh just to reset the game is the sort of broken code that landed the game in this category.

A game that can be finished in five minutes with a single song in its soundtrack and zero sound effects doesn’t make it just bad; it’s unfinished garbage. And using the ‘Touhou’ tag to lure in fans for a generic Asteroids clone is just false advertising in its own right. With overlapping GUI text and a total lack of localization (being only in French), it fails the most basic tests of game design. In short, it’s not enough to be in the Debatably Bad category – it’s an unlocalized, near-silent, glitchy, and five-minute disaster enough to make you pour an entire bottle of water on your keyboard.

Not that you’d want to, but if you’d like to try it for yourself, you can play it here:
https://moustiquefou.itch.io/pacman-survivors