Fruit Ninja for iPhone

What’s it all about?

Fruit Ninja for iPhone is a rather curious success. Not that the game isn’t fun (quite to the contrary, really), but the “game” itself doesn’t seem to have much of a point. Still, that hasn’t kept it from capturing the hearts of a huge percentage of iPhone owners, including yours truly, just like Angry Birds and Doodle Jump before it.

The game turns your finger into a highly-effective cutting implement and the game sends fruit (and bombs) up for you to slash or avoid. It may sound like a simple concept, and it is, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t highly entertaining at the same time. To see images of the game, or even see someone else playing it, is really selling the game short. You’ll only truly understand the enjoyable traits of the game by getting some serious hands-on time with it.

There are two main gameplay modes to choose from. “Classic” mode tosses an ever-increasing amount of fruit on the screen, along with an increasingly large number of bombs. If the player fails to slice a fruit before it goes off-screen, or if the player accidentally slices a bomb, the player is docked one hit point. After losing all three hit points, the game is over. While the “Zen” mode simply gives you a certain amount of time to slice up as much fruit as you can, with no worry of pesky bombs ending your antics early. In both modes you can gain extra bonus points by stringing together particularly efficient combos. If you can slice three or more fruit in a single swipe, you’ll be seeing these points add up rather quickly.

Graphics, Audio and Verdict

The game’s visuals are actually quite a wonder to behold. With all the fruit rendered in full 3D, and exploding into two satisfying halves when sliced, it’s a wonder the tiny device can handle it all with such a smooth frame-rate. When the player strikes a bomb an impressive explosion rings out, and other visual effects are done equally well. In order to select a menu item, you need to slice it in half. This gives the entire game a really light-hearted feel that is great to just pick up and play.

Fruit Ninja is a great sounding game as well. With a very “zen” sounding background theme and pleasant squish and squash sounds as you slice up your fruity foes, you can tell they spared no expense when it came to lights and sounds.

Fruit Ninja has already made its mark on the iTunes App Store as one of the best selling games since the device’s release, so the proof has already made itself clear to anyone who checks out the top games list, but beyond that, it is one of the most playable games available for the system. On top of that, the game gets regular updates and with “Coming Soon” boxes in the menus, it looks like they’re not done adding brand new, free game modes yet either!