Treasures are tallied to unlock secret levels, and heart pieces add up into extra lives when you’ve collected a few. Not only are you matching marbles, you’re grabbing the treasures and heart pieces that explode out of them. Luxor Evolved has a ton going on at any given moment. 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. You stop them by launching other colored marbles into the strings to match three or more of the same color. Strings of colored marbles follow complicated tracks toward your (space) pyramid, which is unusually prone to death by colored marble. Like the last two Luxor titles, you control a ball launcher that moves along the bottom of the screen. But this time it’s space Egypt, and space Egypt has a few new tricks. 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. 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. It shouldn’t be mind blowing that Luxor Evolved looks different from its predecessors, but it sort of is. But Luxor Evolved ($4.99), MumboJumbo’s answer to Zuma‘s evolution, is feeling like the genre’s next frontier.
PopCap stepped things up recently with Zuma’s Revenge ($1.99), which added boss fights and made a few alterations to the formula. Swap ancient Egypt for the Inca Empire and you’ve pretty much got the same game. As a genre it’s been around for nearly 15 years now, and the two big names, Luxor and Zuma, are pretty much indistinguishable.
If there were ever a genre in need of reinvention, it’s the marble shooter.
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