By Thomas Falbo on August 20th, 2007

One of the first titles to hit the Xbox 360’s Live Arcade service, Zuma Deluxe offered what seemed to be quick pick up and play fun whenever you wanted, with its simple and addicting gameplay. While the allure sounds enticing, you might want to reconsider that stance after a session, with what starts out as engaging slowly turns to aggravation after dealing with the game’s combination of uneven difficulty and troublesome controls.

Start at the beginning – what is Zuma? Zuma is a game you’ve played in at least one form while browsing the web, wasting time away. Using a stone frog in the center of the screen, you’ll find yourself spitting colored balls at a never-ending string of them, trying to match pairs of 3 or more in order to prevent them from reaching the other side. By doing tricks such as chaining, or shooting through gaps to collect coins off to the side, you’ll increase your score and fill the Zuma meter, which stops the flow and allows you to remove the rest of the balls, moving on to the next stage. Special balls randomly appear at times, allowing you to do special things such as reversing or slowing the flow, exploding a small radius and removing a fair amount of balls, or increasing your aim and making your frog shoot faster.

The game features two modes, the first being called Adventure. Structured in a series of difficulty increasing temples, you’ll navigate through level after level shooting balls and working your way up. There isn’t much to find here, as you’ll find yourself re-visiting rooms as you make your way further on. Next is Gauntlet, which is more of a survival mode, feeding you a never-ending stream of balls until you can’t keep up. Included with these are online leaderboards to see how you rank, along with 12 achievements, which range from simple to extremely difficult. It doesn’t help that these achievements seem bugged, sometimes not triggering when the requirements are met.

The game’s theme fits well with the sharp HD visuals, along with the accompanying music and sound effects; it’s really by the books. Controls feel loose, making lining up a shot often troublesome and putting you at a bad position early on when dealing with the later levels. Levels are often dependant on the randomization of the balls, where you’ll find yourself either given an easy set to deal with, or a more difficult set, which can make or break how you’ll fare. Knowing you can simply play this game in some form on the web, and the lack of variety in gameplay, you’ll find that dropping $10 on this can be a lot to swallow. After two years on the Live Arcade service, you would think they would drop it in price to generate more interest.