The Xbox Live Arcade has always been about instant gratification: quick downloads, impulse buys, simplicity and accessibility. As such, one thing that often gets overlooked is complex storylines filled with dense narratives, deep character development, and rich back-stories to flesh out the game worlds. Luxor 2, with its tale of one magic scarab beetle's battle against the unending assault of Egyptian god Set's...er, [i]balls[/i], is not going to win any Hugo Awards for advancing fantasy fiction. What it will do is fit nicely into the pickup-and-play, easy to learn hard to master genre that makes the Live Arcade so compelling.

In case you didn't adequately absorb the plot in the first paragraph, Luxor 2 is the sequel to the award winning casual game Luxor. If you've previously played Zuma on the Live Arcade you'll have a pretty good idea of what's going on, but in a nutshell it involves you flinging coloured balls at a long string of other coloured balls, making combinations of at least 3 to destroy said balls, with the eventual goal being the annihilation of all the colourful spheres.

Where Zuma had a giant frog, Luxor 2 has a winged scarab beetle. And where Zuma had a crazy-hard 360 degree ball assault, Luxor 2 puts you on a vertical rail at the bottom of the screen. Luxor 2 also has a very obvious Egyptian theme and the vaguest hint of a plot, and while it is an unspoken rule that giant frogs need no plot, Luxor 2's sense of progression and purpose is nice to have.

What both games share along with Germaine Greer is an intense hatred of balls. You will fling your coloured circles at the advancing string of multicoloured pearls with venom, and as you chain together a vicious series of combos and mass-castrations, Isis rewards you with a variety of ball-busting power-ups to further enhance your sphere-slaying skills. While Zuma relies quite heavily on managing things from 360 degrees, Luxor 2's primary challenge comes from gauging distance and speed. With the balls more tightly packed than an NRL scrum, a slight misfire is all it takes to not only break your combo multiplier, but also adds another sphere to your chain and most likely, breaks an existing chunk of colours, which only further complicates your life.

It probably doesn't sound that complicated unless you happen to be colour-blind or, well, just crap, and truthfully it isn't. Like all successful casual games, Luxor 2's strength is its simplicity: any member of the family can sit down and play the game without any real instruction, and in the opening stages of the sizeable adventure mode, pretty much everyone besides the family dog should be find victory to be easily obtainable. In fact your first level or two should net you a couple of quick Achievements which always makes people feel special, but obtaining them all is probably one of the most time-consuming and difficult of all Live Arcade Achievements.

The meat of Luxor 2 comes in the adventure mode, which consists of 14 stages comprising almost 90 individual levels. Each level can take between five and fifteen minutes to beat depending on your skill level and the speed of Set's wicked ball assault. No matter how you cut it, this is a lot of game for your points, and it is only compounded by the fact there's three main difficulty levels for the adventure mode, with a super-insane-mega-difficulty mode called the Challenge of Horus. To say that this game represents a dozen or more hours of ball-tossing fun would be a bit of an understatement, and this isn't even touching on the other gameplay modes.

Also included for your sphere-slingin' satisfaction is both survival mode and the all new Pharaoh's Challenge. Survival is, as you would expect, a never-ending stream of balls for you to decimate, the idea being to rack up the highest score and survive as many waves as possible. The Pharaoh's Challenge is a little bit different; rather than hurling balls at balls, you're armed with the Pharaoh's dagger power-up from the adventure mode, which allows you to essentially burst the colourful bubbles to make chains instead of trying to join them up. It's not radically altered from the basic premise, but it's a great way to hone your dagger skills for the bonus rounds in adventure mode.

Aside from the over-abundance of bally goodness, the first thing you'll notice about Luxor 2 is the striking Egyptian motif. The game looks stunning in high-definition and runs natively in widescreen which is a real bonus, and it makes its closest competitor, Zuma, look positively dated. That said, in some of the levels spotting the difference between pink and red balls can be a little difficult, but in a way you can attribute this as much to a deliberate challenge than anything else. It really forces you to stop and take stock of your situation rather than just loosing balls willy-nilly.

While the visuals shine, the audio definitely takes a back seat. It isn't bad really, it just fades into the background which is what it is supposed to do. Aside from the distinct glass-breaking sound of a ruined combo chain or the satisfying sound of balls bursting, you don't really need much else. What is worth mentioning is the fact that whoever play-tested this game (and too many others on the Arcade) obviously didn't do it with Xbox Live connected – if they did, then they would most certainly have ensured the notification box was NOT slap bang in the middle of where your scarab travels, essentially blocking you from seeing what colour ball you're using until the notification vanishes. Very, very annoying.