![]() ![]() Swap ancient Egypt for the Inca Empire and you’ve pretty much got the same game. PopCap stepped things up recently with Zuma’s Revenge ($1.99), which added boss fights and made a few alterations to the formula. But Luxor Evolved ($4.99), MumboJumbo’s answer to Zuma‘s evolution, is feeling like the genre’s next frontier. It shouldn’t be mind blowing that Luxor Evolved looks different from its predecessors, but it sort of is. Between a new setting in space and wild geometric art it hardly looks like the same game at all, making this the genre’s first serious face lift since 2003. Of course, it is the same game-it’s still about matching and destroying strings of colored marbles, and it even has Luxor’s usual ancient Egyptian theme. But this time it’s space Egypt, and space Egypt has a few new tricks. Like the last two Luxor titles, you control a ball launcher that moves along the bottom of the screen. Strings of colored marbles follow complicated tracks toward your (space) pyramid, which is unusually prone to death by colored marble. You stop them by launching other colored marbles into the strings to match three or more of the same color. With the help of a little aim assistance, this can all be managed on a touch screen as easily as it ever was with a mouse. Luxor Evolved has a ton going on at any given moment. ![]() Not only are you matching marbles, you’re grabbing the treasures and heart pieces that explode out of them. Treasures are tallied to unlock secret levels, and heart pieces add up into extra lives when you’ve collected a few. You also need to rock your score if you want to level up, because the better you do the more powerups you get. The powerups are my favorite feature of Luxor Evolved. Whenever it hits its limit something new unlocks.Įvery point you earn goes to filling up a progress bar after each level. This might be a brand new powerup-and they can do a ton of things, like blow up marbles, paint them in a single color, reverse their path and so on-or it might be an upgrade to an existing powerup. The extra-nice thing about the way the progress is measured is that doing poorly on a boss level means unlocking a huge pile of things. Taking inspiration from bullet hell shooters, they protect their weak points with huge streams of marbles. You have to clear away enough of them to reach the weapons, and then the central ring of marbles. The only problem is that they keep coming back. If you manage to shoot your way through everything you expose the core, and one more shot will destroy it. ![]()
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