Marble Power Blast

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Marble Power Blast is a puzzle game that’s clearly copying its gameplay formula wholesale from Zuma, which sadly isn’t available yet on the Switch.

For those unfamiliar with the formula, you are firing multicolored balls or marbles from a central location at an ever-encroaching line of similar marbles pushing towards an exit hole. If the marbles reach the hole, you lose. To stop them, you shoot your marbles at the line to create matches of 3, destroying them.

It’s a simple formula that worked so very well in Zuma… and it just falls apart here in so many ways. Where to even begin? Well, first of all, the controls here are terrible. Where in console versions of Zuma you could simply point the control stick in the direction you wanted to shoot, here, you must press left or right to spin the targeting device clockwise and counter-clockwise, which means that you can be in the bizarre scenario of needing to move your aim left and having to press right to do so. It’s counter-intuitive and senseless. In addition to this, even with these busted controls, things are even worse because the controls are so sluggish that it takes an agonizing amount of time to aim.

What’s more, a lot of the little tricks and features you could use in Zuma no longer work here. If you want to close a gap between two lines of marbles, for example, you can’t just shoot the same color at both sides to draw them together. There are a lot of little ways that this game just makes “quality of life” adjustments in the wrong direction, removing things that made the game it’s copying work well.

Graphically, this game is… fine. I mean, they didn’t just copy Zuma’s gameplay, they also copied its style, albeit with a lower threshold of quality. It works, but only as a knockoff imitation of a superior product, just as everything here is a knockoff imitation of a superior product.

Look, I know I’m coming off sounding really negative here, and you might think it’s unfair that I keep talking about Zuma in a review of Marble Power Blast, but if this game is going to steal wholesale the formula of another game, I feel it’s only just to compare it to that game, and it is truly a terrible copy.

In the end, as much as I would absolutely love to have Zuma on the Switch, and even a decent knockoff would suffice, I cannot recommend this game. It’s not even a good knockoff. It’s a terrible cash-grab on a well-established game. The folks who made this game should have known better.

tl;dr – Marble Power Blast is a terrible knockoff of Zuma that manages to mess up a formula that’s over 15 years old, with absolutely terrible controls, and a loss of a lot of what made Zuma special. Don’t get this game, even if you’re craving Zuma on your switch. Wait for the real deal, or at least a better knockoff.

Grade: D

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