Dungeons and Ducklings – PS5 Review

Despite being one of the few classic coin-ops that still plays well today, you don’t really get many games that riff on the old Pac-Man formula.  Sure, Namco will drag Pac’s carcass out of the cupboard and beat a few more pennies out of it every chance they can but for a game that was so influential in the ’80s (trust us, you couldn’t move for Pac-Man clones back then), that influence hasn’t really reached out to gaming past, say, the year 2000.

Dungeons and Ducklings is here to change that though.  Developed by Minnesota natives Bear Belly Games, this game brings back some of that old-school maze-running gameplay but adds a modern rogue-lite twist to it all.

You play as MAMA DUCK who needs to rescue all of her ducklings after they are kidnapped by an evil lich.  To do this you need to embark on a journey across four large scrolling levels which play out a little bit like Pac-Man 256 which was a brilliant spin on the original Pac-Man that introduced a scrolling element to the game.  This game uses the same gimmick to good effect.  You travel (mainly in one direction) and have to eat coins, find power-ups and generally dodge the lich’s minions.

Your old Pac-Man skills work here.  You can pre-input direction changes and you generally need to anticipate where the enemies are going to go.  It’s not the extreme ballache that the original Pac-Man was either.  That game was pretty rough but progress here is pretty gentle initially.

Where you might run into trouble is with the boss battles.  There’s one on each of the four levels and they do represent a little step up in difficulty.  They’re far from unbeatable though.  You just need to read their patterns and use your attacks to do damage.  The most trouble comes from having a poor attack though.

This is where Dungeons and Ducklings gets interesting.  As you earn money along your journey, you can spend it on upgrades.  These vary from different weapon types (hint:  use a ranged weapon), passive abilities (perks that activate at regular intervals to either damage enemies or collect more coins) and duckling abilities.  Some of the options are pretty useful but many aren’t, a bit of a bug bear for us when it comes to this type of game.  We’ve hated weak power-ups ever since we found our first fireball on Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins and they still piss us off.

The ducklings add a little bit of risk vs. reward to the gameplay.  You find these along the way and they’ll follow you, acting as extra lives for as long as you’ve got them.  But you can also ‘rescue’ them which involves sending them away.  Do this and you’ll unlock further permanent upgrades from the post-game shop and also will be given power-ups for life of your current run (such as more range on your attacks or more damage dealt).  It works pretty well.

You’ll need to grind a little bit if you want to get to, and beat, the game’s final boss but it doesn’t feel too much like brute-forcing your way through and it’s not an obnoxious grind either.  You can expect to beat the game within a few hours and it’s a fun time while it lasts.  Longevity comes from trying out all the different unlocks, especially if you want to earn the game’s Platinum.  You might struggle though as you’re expected to beat the game with all of the available weapons and some of those are truly useless.

The presentation is okay.  It’s deliberately rough and retro with pixelated visuals but it looks okay.  The reduced resolution isn’t really an issue but the four dungeon environments are a little drab.  Maybe we were spoiled by the lush neo-retro graphics of Pac-Man Championship Edition.

We like Pac-Man though and we’re happy to see this little take on it.  Ultimately the core Pac-Man inspired gameplay is actually pretty enjoyable and it’s smooth and playable enough to elevate the game.  What lets everything down are the rogue-lite aspects.  They’re not as compelling as they should be.  There’s no dopamine highs when you unlock things because everything you unlock is kind of rubbish.  But there are enough okay builds in there to not get in the way of the maze-running fun at least.