Zuma's Revenge is cool on every level

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Controversy can't keep a good frog down--at least not when it spins around and shoots colored marbles from its mouth. Most of the games developed by PopCap(Plants VS. Zombies, Bejeweled) have been received with trouble-free acclaim by Casual Gaming Nation. All except Zuma, a 2004 game that featured an Aztec frog that spit marbles out of its gullet into a growing chain of orbs, to match three colors and prevent them from rolling into a skull-faced drain. Fun,right?Well, Zuma looked and played an awful lot like Ballistic, a Japanese arcade game whose makers didn't exactly appreciate the similarities. That didn't stop nearly 20 million people from downloading and playing Zuma, but it was an unfortunate wart on an otherwise entertaining frog-fest. Flash forward five years, and no such controversy attends the sequel, the inevitably titled Zuma's Revenge! -- just a lot of stressful marble shooting through 60 difficult island and volcano-based levels. It wouldn't be a proper sequel without a few notable improvements, and Zuma's Revenge! brings plenty of tiki heat to the barbecue. Or perhaps we should say tiki lightning, in a nod to the super-cool lightning power-up that turns our reptilian hero blue and blows out every marble of a particular color in the chain. Every chapter of the adventure mode now closes with a Space-Invader-esque boss battle, with our froggy pal sliding back and forth across the bottom of the screen and dodging fire from the comical tiki bosses. Like a lot of PopCap's games, Zuma's Revenge! is backloaded, in the sense that a lot of the coolest features debut deep into the proceedings. The level designs get more and more devious, forcing you to blast through multiple gaps and walls to make matches, or jump from side to side on the board. There's the brutal Iron Frog Gauntlet, a game mode that unlocks only after you've beaten every Tiki enemy in Adventure mode. And we'd be remiss if we didn't give a shout-out to the gut-busing twist that accompanies the final boss battle.(Let's just say that Ultimate Tiki is one Whacked-out trickster). Don't be surprised if marbles aren't the only thing that goes down the drain when you download this one. Your free time, sucked away in a flash of just-one-more-level-itis, is likely to follow.