A Litte Too Familiar?

An early favourite on the Xbox Live Arcade was the ball spitting, tribal frog puzzle Zuma and Luxor 2 follows in its hop steps but, unfortunately, a little too closely behind.

To describe Luxor 2 with a single phrase would be very easy, I'd simply say: Zuma but easier. The game features an impressive 88 levels and four game types, of which the Pharaoh's Challenge is new and exclusive to the Xbox Live Arcade version.

The whole game has a big Egyptian theme with the menus covered in hieroglyphics, mysterious music and those horrible little bugs that get under your skin that come second only to the casting of Brandon Fraser in making us a little uncomfortable when watching The Mummy.

The game play is exactly the same as Zuma except it's not quite as good. While the destructible orbs in Zuma often surround you and hide upgrades within them, in Luxor 2 you can only shoot up from the bottom of the screen. You also have a small targeting arrow that appears where you can expect the orb you shoot to go making it far to easy to destroy the rolling lines of balls. It's just Zuma again and we've played that loads thanks.

You can even switch the colour of the ball you're about to fire before you actually fire it just like on Zuma. To molly coddle you further, the upgrades and bonus' are kind of drawn to your shooting device meaning it's generally easier to get higher scores.

Whacking the difficulty up to Expert will give seasoned Zuma players more of a challenge, especially in the later levels as everything seems to happen faster and with a lot less mercy and there are certainly more obstacles per level for the lines of orbs to vanish behind or beneath.

The exclusive Pharaoh's Challenge game mode is a little more exciting and you use the Pharaoh's Dagger to just destroy the balls rolling around the level and while you can get bonus points from creating chain reactions, the whole experience feels a little pointless as you can just hammer away at the button and destroy everything on screen.

Visually, the game takes Zuma to the cleaners. The high definition visuals do justice to the beautifully crafted backgrounds of Egyption towns, obelisks and lots of other places you'd expect to see Jack, Sam, Daniel and Teal'c.

There's a total lack of multiplayer features other than the obligatory score boards and the achievements aren't really that inspiring but I guess the Gamerscore whores will still want to pocket the 200 available.

Sadly, this game is more The Mummy than Stargate SG-1 and deserves to go splat on an iris rather than get downloaded onto someone's Xbox 360 for a rather weighty 800 points. If you've not downloaded Zuma then you'll probably enjoy this game but we'd recommend you download Zuma anyway.