3/19/2024 0 Comments Zuma deluxe levelsSometimes you just need luck to survive getting a ball of the right color or a power-up can make the difference between death and reaching the next level. Consequently, Zuma is not a relaxing game since you're nearly always under pressure and struggling to fight off your almost inevitable demise. Sometimes there are multiple streams of balls that overlap (so part of the stream blocks your access to the rest of the stream) or the balls disappear in a tunnel which makes it hard to shoot a ball to a strategic spot in the stream. It starts off easy but once you reach the Sun God difficulty level (which you need to master to beat the adventure mode) the balls move towards the exit at a very high pace and they're already a long way down the track before you can launch your first ball. Fortunately you can turn the music off.įor a casual game aimed at a broad audience Zuma does get challenging. Unfortunately there's only one short piece of music so it does become annoying when you play the game a lot. The music fits the jungle theme of the game and gets more intense when the balls close in on the skull. The sound-effects and music are not bad either. The graphics are colorful and the Aztec-themed artwork is nice too. The graphics are not spectacular, but for a 6 MB shareware game they're definitely OK. After playing the game for quite a while it got a bit too repetitive for me (the gameplay unfortunately doesn't differ much between the various boards & modes) so I didn't do the latter. But only if you're a completist and want to complete the adventure mode and get a high score & a sun god rating for every board in both the gauntlet's survival and practice modes. You can play each board in multiple modes and on four difficulty levels, so Zuma can keep you occupied for while. However, these complex layouts do make the game challenging (see the bad section). Zuma has 21 different boards and some of them have really interesting layouts with tunnels, overpasses or two separate streams of balls that run alongside each other. The different power-ups (rewind: forces back the stream of balls, explosion: takes out a large group of balls of all colors, slow: decreases the speed with which the balls move towards the exit and accuracy: a laser pointer that helps you aim) are useful and can help you quickly change the odds in your favor (for a couple of seconds that is, cause the balls will be back in no time :P). Shooting through gaps, shooting for coins and setting up multiple combo's all give you extra points which let you finish a level faster. It's good that Zuma rewards taking risks. I frequently wished I was able to ponder about my next move a little bit longer. Regularly you're forced to act so quickly that you don't really have the time to think about the best slot to place a ball. Games such as this one are often labeled puzzle games but in Zuma you're often shooting multiple balls per second, so it's got plenty of action. It's really fast-paced and you're constantly making combo's and scoring bonuses. Usually I'm not a huge fan of these "match 3" type of games (in which you need to match 3 or more objects of a similar color or shape to make them disappear) but somehow I found Zuma Deluxe incredibly addictive. Anyway, for me it was the first time I played such a game and Zuma was the game that made the whole Puzzle Loop idea popular. I always used to think that the concept of Zuma was original, until reading Scierce's trivia (see trivia section) made me realize it is somewhat of a clone itself. The controls are simple: use your mouse to spin the frog around to aim, the left mouse-button to shoot and the right mouse-button to switch between the frog's current ball and the next one. Just like Bust-A-Move, Zuma is really easy to get into (but eventually becomes pretty difficult). However this time the balls don't come down from the ceiling but they roll along a winding track towards a skull-shaped exit and it's your job to prevent them from reaching that exit. You still try to clear large numbers of colored balls by shooting other balls at them and making groups of three or more balls of the same color. Zuma Deluxe is a clever take on good old Bust-A-Move.
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