Pac-Man World 3 review

You'd think after watching the truly awful opening cutscene that we'd be primed to give this a damn good kicking. You'd think after seeing how painfully unimaginative it all is that we'd be hard pushed to play it for more than five minutes, but for some very strange reason we found ourselves enjoying it.

It's brainless, yes. It's laughably simple too - but then maybe that's what's so nice about it. Still, you can't escape the fact that there's a shopping list of things that are very wrong with PMW3.

To start with, it's technically ropey. The camera lacks any kind of versatility. Yes you can rotate it around Pac-Man, but more often than not, you're just not getting the angle you need. It doesn't always lead to death, but it makes you nervous about simple jumps.

The frame rate is shocking too. Get any more than three enemies on screen at any one time and it can drop considerably, which is lame considering it's not the most detailed game in terms of its environments.

And then, of course, there's the small matter that there's virtually nothing here that we haven't seen done countless times before over the last 10 years or so.

So while it's not going to win any awards for technical achievement or game design, why are we being so lenient? Well, it never takes itself seriously. It feels unashamedly game-like. It's happy, brightly coloured and oddly satisfying too.