Sometimes, simpler just works better on the iPhone. On a console, the Fruit Ninja iPhone game probably wouldn’t be worth bothering with; but for some reason, slicing fruit with a swipe of the finger becomes enjoyably addicting in app form.
The entire game can be summed up in a few sentences. Fruit is tossed into the air and your job is to swipe your finger across it, slicing it while avoiding also slicing up the occasional bombs that are mixed in with the fruit. If you miss three pieces of fruit, game over. If you slice one bomb, game over.
There’s no particular strategy you could employ other than knowing when best to slice fruit that’s perilously close to a bomb, and while there are leader boards via OpenFeint, this is a bare bones package of an iPhone game at a bare bones price.
And yet I find myself quickly playing it all the time now. Perhaps its ease of entry is its best feature. You can start playing almost immediately; there’s no backstory to get into and nothing complicated at all to worry about.
Visually, Fruit Ninja works because it’s fun to watch fruit get sliced, and thank God, because other than the sliced up fruit over a wooden backdrop, Fruit Ninja isn’t much for scenery.
The sparseness of Fruit Ninja aside, the game does provide you with helpful fruit-related facts while it loads. And really, sometimes all you need in a good iPhone game is a healthy distraction and some facts about bananas.
