Yahoo Zuma Review

Yahoo Zuma

Yahoo Zuma is a fun, challenging puzzle game that requires players to shoot colored balls out of a frog’s mouth to make chains of the same color. The game is playable online or offline, but the online version only has three different stage setups. The game is set up in rounds, and each round has three stages. The online game repeats the same stages for each round but adds more colors and increases the speed to make it more challenging.

How to Play Zuma

Zuma is one of those games that’s incredibly easy to learn, but very hard to master. You control the frog in the middle of the screen. The frog can only spin in place, not move, and it follows your mouse pointer. Clicking the left mouse button makes the frog shoot the colored ball in its mouth straight out. The goal is to make this colored ball hit the chain of balls that is slowly moving through the tunnel towards the skull. The shot ball will insert itself into the chain, and if it is inserted beside two or more balls of the same color, those balls vanish. If it doesn’t make a group of three or more of the same color, it is just added to the chain. Every time a set of balls vanishes, the meter at the top of the screen fills up. The goal is to fill up the meter and clear the stage before the first ball of the chain touches the skull.

Combos

In Zuma, if you make a group of balls vanish, the balls on either side of the chain link together. If this link results in three or more balls of the same color combining, it creates a combo. If you wipe out enough balls and cause big enough combos, the chain may even reverse itself for a few seconds, giving you more room to play.

Special Balls

Sometimes, you’ll see balls on the chain with special symbols, like a pause sign. Deleting these balls causes something special to happen, like an explosion that takes out part of the chain. You should save these special balls until you really need them because they don’t appear very often.

Coins

You will also see a gold coin appear on the Zuma board at random times during a stage. If you have a clear shot at it, shoot a ball into it to receive bonus points and fill the meter a bit more.

Discarding Balls

You can discard any ball you want by shooting it anywhere where it won’t hit the chain. This lets you get rid of useless colors that would only add to the chain, and if you have a gap in the chain and shoot a ball through it, you gain bonus points.

Zuma Gameplay

Zuma is a challenging game that gets more difficult as players progress, though it’s very easy to learn. The graphics are solid, with the balls looking like multifaceted gems and the stone frog being fairly detailed. The sounds, too, are fun and fit the game, with different noises playing when you make combos or hit the gold coin.

The Bottom Line

If you are looking for a fun, addictive game to waste some time on, Zuma is a great choice. Even though the online stages repeat, the game increases in difficulty, so it doesn’t become boring. The downloadable version of the game includes more stage setups and other options, so players who enjoy the game a lot may want to pay the small fee to download the full version.

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