If you want some fast and easy achievement points, then it's worth the $5. If not, the trail version will suit you fine.
The newly released version is a breath of fresh air to the franchise. With all the medicore 3D console games being released, most have lost touch with what Pac-Man once was. Now you can relive it's glory days. Pac-Man, the way it was meant to be.
The game plays just as you remember. No face buttons are used. You only need either the directional pad or left analog stick. Heck, you can play this game with one hand on the controller. The directional pad is the weaker choice of the two because it requires perfect timing on your part when you want to turn. You will find yourself missing your mark and running straight into a wall or a ghost. I've run into this problem a few rare times with the analog stick, but not enough times to ruin the experience.
The object of Pac-Man, as you may know by now, is to guide a yellow circle around a board and eat all the yellow dots. This would be simple if not for the ghosts floating around trying to stop you. Thankfully, there are flashing yellow dots on the four corners of the playing surface called Power Pellets that will turn the ghost blue and allow Pac-man to eat them for extra points. There are also fruits that pop up in the middle that can be eaten for even more points. This all may sound crazy to a younger person, but most people know exactly what I'm talking about.
This is a simple and easy game. Sure, the enemies get faster, smarter, and more aggressive as the game goes on and the effectiveness of Power Pellets decreases eventually making them the same as all the other dots, but, the level of challenge is removed from the game since you are provided with a level select. It may take you two or three tries to beat a stage, but if you're willing to give up some lives you will get though them rather quickly.
There seem to be no end to the number of levels in Pac-Man. The game gets consistenly harder up to level 21 and then seems to stay at that difficulty. But, as I said before, there is little challenge since you can just level select.
The graphics are the old-school Pac-Man look we all know and love. Sure, it's nothing fancy, just simple shapes, but hey, it looks better than all those 3D Pac-man games to me.
The sound is still standard Pac-Man. The sound of Pac-man eating (you know that Whaka Whaka Whaka noise) is intact along with all the other sound effects. They have held up suprisingly well over all these years.
The game provides some replay value simple becasue is Pac-Man. You will come back to this game every once and a while and playing it with your friends to try and beat each others high scores is always fun. There is no online multiplayer to speak of, but I'm not really sure how they would pull that off anyway. There are leaderboards to track your scores though.
The real deciding factor to whether you should lay down the $5 to buy it is if you want some easy achievement points. The game has 12 achievements totaling to 200 points. In one hour of dedicated play, I had 11 of them and and got up to level 22. They range from collecting the different fruits to getting past certain levels. The only real difficult one requires you to eat all the ghost four times on one stage. That means using each four Power Pellets to their fullest. It is hard and will take awhile to get, but I'm sure it won't take long.
If you don't care about the points, the trail version will suit you just fine. You'll get the full Pac-Man experience even if you don't get alot of levels. It's still a fun game even in this day and age and $5 isn't that much for such an old favorite, but if you don't think you'll be playing this game all that much, save your money. But hey, atleast it's better than the recent Street Fighter release.