The graphics in Zuma Deluxe are, on the one hand, fairly undemanding, but on the other they're really very attractive and artfully done. Certainly you won't need a powerful graphics card to play the game, so it should run very well even on pretty old systems, and the screen resolution is only 640×480 pixels (you can play either full-screen or in a window). But equally well, the undemanding nature of the graphics doesn't matter in the slightest. They're exceedingly attractive and suit the game perfectly. The quality of the artwork is excellent, there's plenty of attractive twinkling animation, and the lusciously colorful balls look almost like boiled sweets that you could pick off the screen and suck. (When I was a small child, there were some lovely fruity spherical boiled sweets called Glimpies, and the balls in Zuma bring back happy memories of eating them!)

I have just two small criticisms of the graphics in Zuma. The first is that, in later temples, a buff color is introduced as one of the ball colors, and it's much the same color as the body of your frog, which can make it hard to see at a glance when that's the current ball-color in the frog's mouth. More practically, given that the game's resolution is just 640×480 pixels, that makes for a very pokey little window if you're playing on a high-resolution monitor. Those of us who have large monitors are pretty much obliged to use full-screen mode, merely to be able to see what's going on. I'd have liked to see at least a pixel-doubling mode, and perhaps a range of different sizes, for use in windowed mode.

Oddly enough, despite the nature of your game character, there are no rude belches or other frog-like sounds in Zuma. However, the sound does work pretty well. As you fire balls into other balls, there are satisfying cracks and clicks much like the sounds made by balls hitting one another on a snooker or pool table, which suits the game nicely. There's constant vaguely tribal-sounding music to accompany the game, which is adaptive and becomes much more urgent as the balls get dangerously close to the gaping skull-hole. As well as mumbo-jumbo words, you can hear voices singing "push, push" and "pressure, pressure" as things heat up. It all suits the atmosphere very well.

Zuma turned out to be one of the most unexpectedly good games I've encountered recently. It's a fantastic game; I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's the sort of game that you can pick up instantly and play easily, but which requires a great deal of skill to play well in the later levels. It demands a surprising amount of strategy later on, though you never have enough time to think carefully about what you're doing when the pressure's on. It's relentless but great fun, and is entirely suitable for, and appealing to, players of all ages.

Pros

• Extremely addictive and excellent fun

• Suitable for everyone

• Easy to pick up and play, for both long and short bouts

• Very low system and disk space requirements

• CD doesn't have to be in the drive to play

Cons

• A few more screen layouts would have been nice (or the ability to add more)

• In windowed mode, the window is really too small unless you have a very low-res screen

• A mouse is needed to play; on a laptop, you can't get away with only the trackpad

• Silly story (but who cares?)