Zuma’s Revenge! is PopCap Game’s attempt at a sequel and it comes closer than many follow-ups to capturing the magic of the original. But how do you make a sequel to an iconic game? It is a problem that has plagued many developers and is pretty much prevalent in every genre. After all, once you make a masterpiece, it is hard to get lightning to strike twice.
This is why “sequels” to some classics either fall victim to the sands of time or never see the light of day in the first place.
How to Download Zuma’s Revenge!
Zuma’s Revenge! (released in 2009) can be downloaded from Steam. What’s more, you can even try it for free by getting its free demo. You can also download the 2006 Zuma Deluxe. It has a demo as well. And if you fancy match-three games have a look at HuniePop or Fishdom.
The Game Review
From a developer’s standpoint, there’s a ton of risk involved in making another iteration of a game that many consider perfect. Take Tetris, for example: Though many sequels are out there, few equal to the original. None merit the title of a successor.
Usually, in video games, sequel denotes the next edition and there is, implicit in that notion, a promise of steady evolution or even improvement.
But how does one improve Tetris?
This was probably the dilemma that faced PopCap Games when they sat down to come up with a sequel to Zuma, one of the early 2000s most iconic games one of the biggest web-based games of that era as well.
Zuma is a matching-tile puzzle game involving a snaking board but, overall, the same mechanics as the vertically-stacked variants that make up the majority of this genre.
Coming out before Puzzle Quest, Zuma introduced a lot of people to the matching-tile puzzler and became a bit of a sensation in its own right just like Tetris. Similar to Tetris, it was spread virally via PCs but, this time, instead of a diskette, the web served as the access point for the game.
It has since made an appearance on almost every format much like its counterpart Bookworm.
And that’s because it is basically just more of the same but bigger and better – just as a sequel should be.
There aren’t any serious gameplay changes in this sequel nor is anything thrown into the mix just because. Zuma’s Revenge! is truly a continuation of the first game and that makes it pretty awesome all on its own.
Released for everything from Nintendo’s DS handheld to PC’s in 2011, Zuma’s Revenge! had a largely warm reception in the critical press.
A lot of the praise centered around the game’s expansion of the first game’s core concepts while avoiding making anything needlessly complicated. Other highlights include the vibrant graphics and crisp, clear sound and music that the game had.
Known for its high-quality games in this space, PopCap Games is an interesting tale by itself. Starting as a web-based provider of video games, PopCap now finds itself on consoles and smartphones competing with a lot of the derivative games of gaming concepts the company popularized.
