Zumba Blitz

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Zumba Blitz is a Match-3 Puzzle game released on Nintendo Switch in 2022. This is technically the third game in the Zumba series on Nintendo Switch after Zumba Aqua and Zumba Garden, and once again this game has nothing to do with the Zumba fitness franchise, but rather is a game that’s clearly designed to be a knockoff of the classic Puzzle game, Zuma. As it happens, I felt that Zumba Aqua was one of the better Zuma knockoffs, and Zumba Garden was even better, almost being good enough to consider on par with the original game. With a track record like that, fans of this type of game might rightfully be eager to see what this series has in store for its follow-up release.

Massive disappointment, that’s what it has in store.

Despite that Zumba Blitz was designed by the developer of the first Zumba game, Inlogic Software, this game has none of the polish and quality that game saw. This is a big ugly mess of a game in pretty much every respect. Where the presentation of Zumba Aqua might not have appealed to everyone with its cartoony visuals, Zumba Blitz is even worse, with flat, plain, boring 2D visuals that look like they were quickly slapped into the game, backed by xylophone music that’s far too repetitive. After seeing the wonderfully-detailed visuals in Zumba Garden just a few months prior to this, why on Earth would any publisher put a game out looking like this unless they were hoping to make a quick, cheap, lazy buck?

When it gets to the gameplay, things get even worse, with players inexplicably using the right analog stick to aim their balls, and one of the left shoulder buttons to fire. Who the heck thought this was a good button layout? This is paired with a clunky power-up system, and nothing anywhere near as thoughtful or nuanced as the RPG-style power-up system we saw in Zumba Garden.

I just don’t know how we got to this point. The Zumba series has been bounced between multiple developers and publishers, yet it has maintained a consistent quality throughout, being some of the best Zuma knockoffs I have ever played. Yet the one time a game in this series returns to a developer that worked on one of the prior games, it’s absolute trash? I sincerely hope that for future installments in this series, they actually put some real effort into it, because this game is a pretty horrible turn for an otherwise solid series.

tl;dr – Zumba Blitz is a Match-3 Puzzle game which, like its predecessors, is clearly copying the Zuma formula. Unfortunately, while the previous games were some of the best games of this kind to hit the Nintendo eShop, Zumba Blitz is one of its absolute worst, with ugly, slapped-together visuals and inexplicably poorly-designed gameplay. I do not know how a game this poorly-conceived and poorly-made can release just a few months after one of the best games of its kind, all within the same series. However, whatever the reason, make it a point not to get this game – you are far, far better off getting one of the other games in this series.

Grade: D

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