Zuma High Speed Challenge Review

Taking a cue from the success of Bejeweled Blitz, the team at PopCap have just released another totally free time-limited spin on a classic formula. Zuma High Speed Challenge takes the ball-bursting, color-matching action you know and love, puts it online, and has you struggling to get as high a score as you can in under 3 minutes.

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Taking a cue from the success of Bejeweled Blitz, the team at PopCap have just released another totally free time-limited spin on a classic formula. Zuma High Speed Challenge takes the ball-bursting, color-matching action you know and love, puts it online, and has you struggling to get as high a score as you can in under 3 minutes.

If you're at all familiar with Zuma or Zuma's Revenge, you're going to know exactly what to expect in Zuma High Speed Challenge. Controlling a ball-spitting frog in the center of the screen you'll try to make matches of three or more like-colored marbles as they slink along a path. Once you make a match the marbles will disappear. Move too slowly and the seemingly endless parade of marbles will reach a hole and disappear, thus ending the game.

What makes Zuma High Speed Challenge a little different is that the object of the game isn't to eliminate all of the marbles from the board, but to rack up as high a score as possible in under 3 minutes. Your game can still end early by letting the marbles slip into the abyss, but with a slightly different objective you'll find that you'll need to bust balls a little faster than you ever have before if you want to do well.

The game is limited to only one map, but it's a small and understandable sacrifice in a game that's all about high score competition. There's only one thing that's really missing here, but it's such a huge omission it left us scratching our heads when we should have been enjoying our games: where was the social integration?

You'd expect a game with a formula clearly inspired by PopCap's own Bejeweled Blitz to be all about competing with your friends on Facebook, but Facebook Connect options are nowhere to be found! Why create a game all about getting a high core in this day and age without letting you fight for supremacy on a Facebook friends' leaderboard? How about on any kind of a leaderboard? There's no central high score database to check out when you end your round. Nowhere to enter your initials. Nowhere to even track your own past scores. In a game that's all about score, this total lack of competition is baffling.

What makes this omission stand out even more like a sore thumb is how much better this is than PopCap's proper Facebook-connected Zuma. The other Zuma (also not playable directly on Facebook) was little more than the old web-based version of Zuma with Facebook friends' scoring competition and a few medals to mark scoring milestones thrown in. Zuma High Speed Challenge, on the other hand, has a much higher level of visual polish. It's downright beautiful – nigh indistinguishable from the recently released Zuma's Revenge.

Zuma High Speed Challenge offers up a great, score-driven version of Zuma but falls flat on its face when it comes to embracing the social aspects needed to make score-driven games worthwhile. One can hope that changes are on the way, but unless they materialized Zuma High Speed Challenge feels like little more than a dry run for what we expect to be Zuma's inevitable conquest of Facebook.

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      60 out of 100
      Jim Squires is the Editor-in-Chief of Gamezebo. Everything you see passes his eyes first, so we like to think of him as "the gatekeeper of cool stuff." He likes good games, great writing, and just can't say no to a hamburger. Also, he is not a bear.