Zuma's Revenge - Review

Zuma's Revenge
Rating: E - Everyone

A cute game. Colored balls roll onto the screen following one or more paths. You control a frog statue which has a colored ball in its mouth and one on its back. Touching the screen anywhere causes the frog to shoot the ball from its mouth. A new ball, with possibly a different color will then replace it. If you have tapped the screen on one of the rolling balls, the shot will hit that ball and join the line of balls, but if it creates a run of three or more of the same color, that set vanishes. The idea is to eliminate all the balls before the string gets to the exit portal.

Naturally, the length of the ball strings changes as you go from level to level, and the speed that they roll on the path also tends to increase. There are various trick balls which can slow the collection, or explode (taking several more balls out of play), etc. You can swap the ball in the frog's mouth with the one on its back to get a different color to play.

There are several modes of play. In Adventure mode, upon completion of a stage, you get a new stage. However, after a while you get a Boss stage, which is different in that you have to hit the boss target many times, while it is moving around behind strings of balls. And, the boss target flings things at you which you have to dodge.

In Daily Dungeon mode, you spin a kind of slot machine which delivers up three games from a random selection of adventure mode, boss mode and astro mode games. The balls follow a visible path (or paths) in Adventure mode, but in Astro mode, the path is never explicitly shown.

Challenge mode has a set of Adventure type stages which get unlocked only when you do well enough in the previous unlocked ones.

The the various power-ups and specialties are only sketchily explained - I could never figure out how to use the laser beam power-up at all. Proceeding from stage to stage is dependent on successful completion of each stage. Since I could never get past the first Boss stage, I have no idea what stages 10 through 70 are like, nor what the Iron Frog mode is, since you are not allowed to play that mode until you complete the entire Adventure mode with its several Boss battles. Also, if you fail to complete a stage before losing all the lives allotted to you, you are thrown back to the previous save point, which means that you must replay already played stages over and over and over …


Fun Factor: Interesting use of moving balls for a Match-3 game
Female Factor: Zip
Player Friendly: Needs work

Reviewed by: Lou Katz - Mar/12

  • Zuma's Revenge
  • © PopCap Games
  • Platform(s): DS
  • To Order: DS http://www.amazon.com/ $18.40