Zumania – Magic Casual Puzzle

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

Zumania is a family-friendly Match-3 Puzzle game released on Nintendo Switch in 2021. This game is… well, let’s be honest, this is off-brand Zuma. You know, the game where you shoot colored balls at an encroaching line of balls to clear them away before they reach the end you’re protecting? Yeah, this is that. The game doesn’t even really try to hide this fact – it’s right there in the name, just begging for a trademark infringement suit. However, I always make it a point to say that it’s okay for a game to be a copycat so long as it’s a good copycat, and since we don’t actually have Zuma on the Nintendo Switch, Zumania would be a welcome addition to the Nintendo Switch library if it was actually a decent Zuma clone. So… is it?

Actually… yeah.

Don’t get me wrong, Zumania’s presentation just screams “generic”. The balls look good enough and animate well, but every other part of the presentation here just screams “mobile game”, from the menu design right down to the cartoony sound effects. If you were just looking at this game rather than playing it, you may well dismiss it outright.

However, the gameplay here is actually solid. The original Zuma is still better – this game’s physics are good but not always consistent, and this game lacks some of Zuma’s nuance. But for the most part, this game succeeds in replicating that classic Puzzle game’s experience. It even lets players use either decent traditional gamepad controls or some excellent touchscreen controls.

That’s not to say this game isn’t without its flaws. As I mentioned, it’s lacking some of the polish and nuance of Zuma, it’s uninspired and unoriginal, and it lacks any sort of multiplayer features or even a leaderboard. But at its core, this game still plays well, and $10 for 100 levels is a good price (though of course it’s an even better price if you catch it on sale).

In short, if you’re looking for Zuma on Nintendo Switch… well, you won’t find it. But Zumania is the next best thing. It’s a knockoff, to be sure. But it’s a quality knockoff. And if you’ve never played Zuma, you might not even notice, and you’ll likely just see this as a solid Match-3 Puzzle game… albeit one with a terrible mobile-style presentation. However, so long as you can look past that, as well as the lack of originality, you’ll find this to be a game well worth playing.

tl;dr – Zumania is a family-friendly Match-3 Puzzle game that’s clearly a knockoff of Zuma, but it’s a good knockoff. It has the presentation of a cheap mobile game, but the actual gameplay here is solid. Since Nintendo Switch still doesn’t have an actual port of Zuma, this is the next best thing, and Puzzle game fans would do well to seek it out.

Grade: B

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Andy Miller, Exlene, Johannes, u/RamboFox, Ilya Zverev, Connor Armstrong, Eli Goodman, K.H. Kristoffer Wulff, and Stov. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}