Zuma

The Short


Pros
- Fun ball-shootin' puzzle action game that's simple in concept but gets difficult
- Aztec/Mayan theme is appealing and looks bright and colorful
- Tons of levels and a variety of stages
- Power-ups are unique, helpful, and require still to obtain
- Can get stupid addicting

Cons
- Ends up recycling stages near the last 1/2 of the game
- Later levels have a difficulty level bordering on insane
- Very hard to play with an Xbox 360/PS3 controller
- No real bonus content to speak of

Another day, another game about balls. 

The Long

So in my Luxor 2 review I pretty much panned the game for ripping this one, Zuma, off. So you'd expect I liked Zuma more, and you'd be correct. While the core components between these two games are essentially the same, Zuma does it with much better skill, style, and polish compared to the inferior Luxor 2.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's just do this review for Zuma.

Frogs n' balls.

Zuma is essentially a puzzle action game, with further emphasis on "action" than "puzzle" as the game goes along. You are a spinning frog in the middle, and around you a winding trail of multicolored balls weaves. By shooting colored balls of your mouth, you insert them into the sequences, and if you make a match of three or more of the same color the balls explode. Your goal is to fill the Zuma meter at the top, at which point the balls will stop coming and you have to clear out the remaining ones to win. If they reach the mouth at the end of the stage you are done. And that's it.

Where Zuma works is not just it's obviously addicting formula, but it's well-designed stages paired with a difficulty curve that starts on "sleepwalk" to "absolutely infuriating." You start with only four different colors of balls, and after each chapter another color is added. Of course, the more colors mean the less combos occurring naturally in the chain, making it harder to get combos. While this is going on the required combos to finish a level goes up, the chain starts further out, and the game basically just gets much harder. By the end the game is straight up crazy, and I take no shame in saying it's one of the hardest casual games I've played.

I mean seriously. Look at this. This guy is so screwed. 

The game tips the balance in your favor with power-ups. Unlike Luxor 2, where just getting three matches in a row drops a random one (letting you "break" the game), Zuma distributes the powerups as special balls on the chain. Destroy them and you gain the power-up, be it area damage, lasers, precision shot (aka useless). But wait too long to claim them and they go away. This adds a sense of reckless abandon, ignoring long-term strategy in an attempt to get to that powerup explosion. It's a sense of risk/reward that Luxor 2 completely ignored and Zuma perfects.

Another risk/reward factor is the coins. Coins are often in the worst spots (see lower left of the above image) but add such a huge boost to the Zuma meter (especially on later levels) they can turn the tides quickly. So trying to get to those while managing powerups and the steadily-increasing difficulty makes Zuma stressful, in a good way.

Exploring ruins with a frog. It's like...everything I ever dreamed of doing. 

Zuma has excellent level design as well, again unlike Luxor 2. While Luxor's paths are just there, Zuma's are obvious from the start, and clearly planned around the spinning frog mechanic. There's also more of them, though they do repeat, but the repeats are so far distanced from the originals it never annoyed me.

If Zuma has one major flaw it's that there are no tricks up its sleeve. Tactics mentioned above (going for powerups and coins) persist throughout the entire game, it just adds more colors of balls. And while you can shoot for high scores or par times (which those par times get nuts), other than keep on playing over and over there isn't much to offer. Sure, the core gameplay is extremely solid, it just lacks in variety. 

You can also cheat with Gap Bonuses if you are a sneaky player. 

Graphically the game looks pleasing throughout, even if the colors are a bit muted. I appreciate the "all pixel art" graphics vs. ugly pre-rendered backdrops that would look bad on the PS1. Effects are a bit underwhelming, though, and it would have been nice to have seen a higher resolution. Still, it's a fine looking game overall, with plenty of colors mixed with a good art style that ties everything together nicely.

Mobile versions look good, too. 

To be honest, Zuma's biggest problem isn't anything core (though it is a bit too simple for its own good) or even within it's control; it's that it exists in a world where Zuma's Revenge has been released. Zuma's Revenge (essentially Zuma 2) fixes all the issues I had with the first game with flying colors, adding more variety, stages, and zaniness that the series needed to stay fresh. Compared to it, Zuma actually comes off as stale. Again, no fault of its own, but it's more of a "testing the waters" game rather than a "refining a concept" game. 

As it stands, it's still worth getting if you don't have a platform that plays Zuma's Revenge (like if you only own an Xbox or a PS3 and no computer or smartphone). It's still a blast from beginning to end, just don't expect much to change (minus the difficulty. HARD.)

Three out of five stars. 

I always thought "Deluxe" was a weird word. Trying saying it. "Dee-lux." Weird!