Review:
Review - Zuma

PopCap’s Aztec-themed puzzler may be a few years old, but it’s still as compulsive as ever.

I’ve always been fascinated by the origins behind ideas. For the most part, it’s easy to imagine how our favourite videogame concepts came into fruition. It’s not impossible to conceive Hideo Kojima viewing James Bond at an early age, and mentally forming the foundations for his own solid take on Cold War espionage. Or that the first thing Capcom’s Shinji Mikami thought upon seeing PlayStation technology was how he’d finally be able to scare the living daylights out of wannabe zombie survivalists. After playing Zuma, I now like to envision someone at PopCap Games leaping out of bed like Archimedes from his bathtub and exclaiming “I’ve got it! A stone frog idol has to spit coloured marbles at other coloured marbles to save them from being sucked into the gaping maws of an Aztec skull-god!”

Okay, that’s probably not how Zuma came into existence, but in an industry where three of the most recognisable mascots are a mushroom abusing plumber, a blue hedgehog and a yellow pill-thing that eats ghosts, I guess anything goes. It’s so much easier to accept these things in videogames than any other media. Anyway, PopCap’s addictive puzzler has now made its way to European PS3s, and is fundamentally the exact same game that was released for PCs in 2003 and the 360’s Live Arcade in 2005. This version features some minor additions, such as 1080dp visuals, trophy support and, most notable of all, Remote Play via the PSP.

Not that Zuma really needs to evolve. One of the factors that has kept this game popular for so long is how it combines of the familiar blend of colour-matching and hand-eye coordination with a highly demanding level of accuracy. While Zuma could be considered a descendent of the Puzzle Bobble series (amongst many others), here the balls you are required to match in threes are anything but static. In fact, the flow of the stream of doomed balls is so erratic, with chain reactions and power-ups pausing or reversing their movement as much as your own actions, that one of the key elements of Zuma soon becomes anticipating how each shot will affect your next. All while a skull symbol slowly opens its jaws to consume the first marble to reach its destination, spelling game over.