Ever see a bowl of fruit and want to mess that shit up? I know, me too. Developer Halfbrick Games had that same primal urge as well and created an ode to slicing and dicing fruit with the destructive force of a Margaritaville Blender, Fruit Ninja.
Game: Fruit Ninja Kinect
Publisher: Halfbrick Games
Developer: Halfbrick Games
Genre: Casual
Price: $10.00/800 Microsoft Points
Pros: Gameplay is fun and focused
Cons: Asking price is too much
Verdict: A great iOS game makes the jump to Kinect successfully, but is too expensive
Like Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja became a part of public consciousness because of the iPhone. The premise is extremely to the… point (ninja puns FTW). As fruit flies in the air, it is up to you to slice it in half while avoiding bombs. With the iPhone, slicing was all gesture controls. That was the past, and with Fruit Ninja on the Kinect, now we are living in the full body control future. Get ready to swing your arms around like mass fruit murder indiscriminately laying waste to fruit peasants.
To cut (more ninja puns!) to the chase, Fruit Ninja is a fun little downloadable game. I had so much fun that even after a few rounds of wildly swinging my arms around like a moron, I found the strength and determination to play a few more rounds. The gameplay is tightly focused and straightforward. A few different modes attempt to create a nice fruit salad of options, but the kernel the Fruit Ninja sprang from is omnipresent, like a shadowy assassin lurking in the night following a lone banana home from the bar. In that sense, Fruit Ninja is a resounding success. The core experience the developers wanted to cram down fruit holes is refined to a near science.
The problem with Fruit Ninja for the Kinect is that the game’s price is too damn high. Maybe it was the 99 cent sales on the iTunes App Store, but justifying over 10 dollars for a game about slicing fruit with your arms isn’t all that appetizing. It’s a mini-game when you really boil it down, and it can’t escape that label no matter how many times a banana is thrown at your face.
In a party setting, the price is more justifiable since watching your friends act like a fool is always priceless–even more so when there is alcohol involved. Just watch out that you don’t give a friend a black eye with a killer hand slice–doubly so if aforementioned alcohol was involved.
For as fun as Fruit Ninja is, there isn’t a lot of content to throw fruit at. If the price were lowered, recommending the ripe gameplay would be a no brainer. As it stands, you really need to want to be a ninja at any cost and think fruit is the scum of the earth to drop a Hamilton (too soon?).
GrE Grade: C
Popularity: 2% [?]
