Writing about Luxor 2 without mentioning Zuma is going to be hard. So I’m not even going to bother trying.
Luxor 2 is a direct clone of Zuma. Almost. Yeah, I know Zuma is a clone of ten million other games, but they’re not on the 360 so don’t count. It’s like the Luxor people looked at Zuma and went, “We gots to gets some o’ that”. Of course, they carefully changed some stuff so as to avoid it looking like a Zuma clone. Like the balls. Oh, no – not them. They’re the same.
In fact, the only really gameplay difference is that your ball-firing thing is limited to horizontal travel across the bottom of the screen, rather than pointing in a circle from somewhere in the middle. And, this makes it crap. Aiming becomes harder, catching power-ups has to be manually done, and the “bat” (since it’s much like Pong really) isn’t as well implimented as the ball-thing in Zuma.
But the best thing about Luxor 2 is the way they’ve “themed” it. You know how in Zuma everything is Aztec styled? With Aztec temples and Aztec music and Aztec pyramids? Well, the Luxor 2 programmers obviously thought “GENIUS! We need to theme our game too. Something like Aztec pyramids, but not! Something unique to us… like Aztec pyramids, only different. Hmmm… pyramids… OH MY LORD! Egyptian Pyramids! Amazing! We’re aces, we are!”
And so it came to pass. And it’s nasty.
