Zuma Revenge Review

I haven’t really played the Original Zuma so unfortunately I can’t compare it with Zuma Revenge.

Zuma Revenge though, is another fun yet addictive game from PopCap Games. Just like any other PopCap games, you’ll always crave for “Just one more round!” after you start playing Zuma Revenge.

You are playing as an Aztec Frog (it doesn’t really matter actually) that can shoot coloured balls from his mouth. The idea of the game is to prevent a string of coloured balls from ever reaching the Skull pit (the string of balls will move steadily towards the pit and you need to fire an exact colour ball to match and destroy balls of the same colour that you hit or next to it). You win when there are no more balls left in the round.

Of course that may sound simple, but new balls will spawn every some milliseconds, building tensions as you play the round.

So yeah, the idea of the game is for you to match a coloured ball (say green) with 2 or more of the same coloured (green) balls. The adjacent balls of the same colour will then “explode” and the string of balls will get shortened. You need to hurry though. Think too long and you’ll find that the string gets longer and longer, giving you that tension and nervous look. Of course, shooting the ball to hit the right spot is a challenge too. Shoot it wrongly and you’ll find it even harder to win when the string of balls have different colours adjacent to each other (remember that you need 2 or more of the same coloured balls to make them disappear).

To make things more exciting, there are some temporary “power-ups” to help you out in the game such as a laser sight to make you aim more accurately, a once off 3-burst “shotgun” shots, a slow-mo, and a few more others.

There isn’t any storyline as far as I know when I was playing it for this review. I didn’t understand why I was born as a frog. I didn’t understand what I accomplished by preventing the balls from ever reaching the Skull pit. There were also some dry jokes being thrown in the conversation but again, it didn’t really help anything to the story.

There are maps that will be unfolded as you play and each map consists of a few rounds.

But again, I didn’t see any sense of progression of the storyline as new areas were made available. It just means you still have more Zuma goodness to play with.

There are also some boss fights in Zuma Revenge which give an interesting twist, but it basically only requires you to disable the boss’ defense mechanism before you can hit him with your balls (oops I mean, your frog’s balls… err you know what I mean!).

The levels are quite easy but it gets tougher and tougher towards the end. At level 23-ish, I started to struggle and shot the balls like crazy if I really wanted to successfully go through the round.

It gets tougher towards the end..

At level 50-ish, it got even tougher and I died so many times in a round until I gave up playing. I haven’t tried playing again since. Not that I was giving up (I’m not that kind of type that give up easily, especially in games!), but I found it enough for writing a review about Zuma Revenge (I heard there are around 60 levels – so I was close). I wasn’t sure my kids (not that I have one) can even finish up Zuma Revenge with this level of difficulty

But then again, I played this casually without really thinking strategically. Expert Zuma players will understand the effect of placing certain balls at certain places at the right time.

..til it gets unbearable to continue (for me)

Suffice to say, Zuma Revenge still gives you that “fun and addictive” feel just like every other PopCap Games. I have to admit that the Zuma and Peggle series from PopCap game style are not really my cup of tea, but I do love Insaniquarium, Bookworm Adventure, and Plants vs Zombies a lot. Even with this in mind, I still had that “just one more round and I’ll stop” moment when I was playing Zuma Revenge. It’s the type of game that you want to play while you are relaxing or chatting with your friends over an instant messaging application. Set it to Windowed mode and it’s the type of game that you can play casually while you are busy doing other things at the same time.

See larger image Zuma's Revenge (CD-ROM) List Price: $19.99 USD New From: $10.00 In Stock Release date September 15, 2009.