I was a huge fan of the Zuma titles back when they first released, so when Zumba – Marble Candy Rush (ZMCR, please Ed?) crossed my desk I was excited — despite the obvious copycat behaviour. A good game is a good game, right? Even when the title is a smattering of buzzwords and search terms designed to get the game in front of as many eyes as possible.
ZMCR (thank god) has all 150 levels unlocked as soon as you boot up the game. Marbles roll down a track and it’s your job to clear them all before they reach the end. You control a giant rotating mouth (clearly designed to look like a generic king) that spits marbles of certain colours in order to match groups of three or more in the “train” to make them vanish. Ideally you do this in such a way as to make another group form and explode, making a lovely chain of generic explosion noises and big big points.
All the while, as you play, multitudes of what I assume to be power ups appear on the screen in bubbles. There is no explanation as to what these do in game (I eventually found it in the games store listing) beyond the esoteric symbols contained within them. In fact, I didn’t encounter a single tutorial or pop up during my time with the game. There’s not a mention of controls, the only settings/options are audio balancing, I have no idea how ZMCR calculates score. This is gameplay boiled down to its purest form.
Touching on the presentation, ZMCR is bare bones at best. General visual presentation is middling, with all the levels I sampled (forgive me for not subjecting myself to all 150 levels) having a single coloured backdrop with a smattering of items on the screen. However, it is never clear whether something is background decoration, or whether it’s an obstacle you cannot shoot through.
The sound effects and backing tracks are inoffensive at best. You aren’t going to miss them if you mute the game and put on your own music.
The game is supposed to be “dessert” themed, and that is the only theme here. I find myself questioning how much effort it would have taken to do more than just colour swapping the backdrop. “Effort” is the key word with this product full stop. ZMCR talks about “four mouthwatering dessert realms” in its store description. Does a slightly differently coloured field and a small rotating set of soundtracks that aren’t tied to any particular grouping really count as differentiating realms?
I also found no place to “spend my sweet coins between levels” as I was promised by the description, nor do I really know what “unlocks” every ten levels (since the first “realm” change I noticed was at level 31. Path detection on the shots worked most of the time, but often the actual train or marbles would lose track of itself if you tried anything more complex than taking shots at either end. Multiple times I found separate sections simply stop moving, and not in the intended way where it waits for the back to catch up, as the split sections would simply trample over each other and lose all collision. The level was still completable, as my marbles interacted with it, but if I found this within 10 minutes of reviewing, it should have been found in testing.
I feel like I may be harshly judging EpiXR Games product here. At £4.19 (at time of review), it’s hard to argue that 150 levels of (mostly) technically sound gameplay isn’t “value”. However, in my heart of hearts, I cannot really speak positively of this lack of effort beyond calling it technically playable. There is no love for the craft here, no thought, just a competently-coded cash grab.
Zumba – Marble Candy Rush was reviewed on an Xbox Series X, but is also available on Nintendo Switch.
