Fruit Ninja Vr Review

Fruit Ninja is another game on the Oculus Quest that has its roots earthed in mobile gaming. Like, Fruit Ninja started off as a mobile title back in 2010 and since then it’s Australian developer, Halfbrick Studios, has brought the game to a number of platforms, finally settling on VR in 2016 on the HTC Vive and PSVR, and as a Oculus Quest launch title.The gameplay in is simple.

In each Touch controller hand, you hold a shiny metal katana sword, ready for chopping some flying fruit. As each wave of fruit gets catapulted into the sky, it’s your challenge to cut, swipe and slice your way through them to score points whilst avoiding flying bombs that are thrown into the mix to hinder your progress. It was highly satisfying on mobile, but it just gets even better in VR.There are four game modes in the game, including Arcade, Classic, Zen and Survival. In Arcade mode you get sixty-seconds to slice and dice fruit to score points. If any bombs are hit by your katana you will lose ten points off your score.

For my preference, only being able to use one side of the sword was more of an annoyance than anything. Jan 02, 2017  Fruit Ninja VR is an addictive, simple game for all ages. You can sit back and relax, stand up and sweat, or play anywhere in between those two extremes. The combination of bright colors, rewarding sounds, and precise motion tracking with the Move.

You can also enter into a frenzy and have fruit tossed at you from all angles and freeze time to slice fruit whilst they fly around you in slow motion.Classic mode is similar to Arcade however there is no time limit set and you have three lives that you must hold on to. If any fruit drop to the floor without being sliced, you lose a life, and if you hit a bomb you face immediate game over.In Zen mode, you have ninty-seconds of time which you can extend by slicing certain fruit. There are no bombs in Zen mode, so there is no punishment as such unless you run out of time. If you can chain time extensions you can play for a long while, but the threat of time doesn’t make this mode very ‘zen’.The final mode in Fruit Ninja VR is Survival, which is something new to me in Fruit Ninja. You face a flying fruit dispensing machine that will change position and throw a wave of fruit in your direction.

You must clear each wave of tossed fruit without missing in order to continue. Although Survival is a nice concept to the basic Fruit Ninja mechanic, I found it quite easy to not connect with all of the fruit thrown at me, which soon ends the game with frustration.

A life system would have been better suited here.The game’s visuals remain bright and colourful, which is something Fruit Ninja has always featured in all of its appearances across its many platforms. The dojo arena you play in stands tall in front and around you and its general visual style and presentation is very pleasing to the eye, Personally. I would have liked to have been able to unlock or play in different themed environments.Due to the frantic nature of Fruit Ninja, I lost a little tracking with my Touch controllers, but this happened very rarely and I was able to recover it fairly quickly during my session. With that said though, the tracking and slicing with your katana feels great and it is quite satisfying, especially when the Freeze slow-motion effect kicks in. Unless you’re a die-hard fan of the fruit slicing franchise, I think Fruit Ninja is priced a little high for what you get in the game and the amount of limited longevity its gameplay offers.

Once you’ve blitzed through the games’ four play modes, which can all be achieved in under fifteen minutes, I didn’t feel as easily drawn to replaying through any of the modes.The snack-able nature of the game’s gameplay was well suited for mobile games, however, its developers have failed to take the opportunity to evolve the franchise, where they could have taken the theme and slicing gameplay mechanic and applied it to a much deeper VR gameplay experience. One that takes more advantage of the Quest and its room-scale abilities.

There are quite a few games that tried to copy Fruit Ninja, but Fruit Ninja VR is developed by Halfbrick Studios, the same company who developed the original Fruit Ninja title, Fruit Ninja Academy, Fruit Ninja FX and Fruit Ninja Kinect 2 that became a big hit, and with the Facebook page that brags with over 6 million fans. Fruit Ninja already celebrated its 5th anniversary, and what an amazing way to continue this great series by bringing it to VR, and that exactly what Halfbrick Studio did when they announced Fruit Ninja VR on June 9, 2016.For those who lived on another planet in the past couple of years, Fruit Ninja is a fruit-slicing game. You play as a ninja that slices fruits that pop up from various directions. You need to be agile, accurate, execute combos and use power-ups to finish levels and try to get the highest score.

The original fruit ninja had a slicing trailing animation that visually displays the player's finger slicing movement on the screen, but Fruit Ninja VR is a bit different. First of all, it's in 3D, and second, it was designed to be played in room-scale with tracked controllers (e.g. Zentials dog food. Vive controllers when played on the HTC Vive), so you get to have dual wielding (two swords) to slice up the fruits, one sword in each hand.In the trailer below you can see how this works.

The swords movement represents a 1:1 movement of the players physical hands, including the same speed. Furthermore, players will also need to rotate their head to looks at different directions where fruits are coming from. You can even see in minute 1:56 in the Fruit Ninja VR trailer that the player picks up a bomb on the sword and push it up so it will explode on top of him, so he won't get hit by it.Bombs are items that are used to fool the player thinking it is a fruit that needs to be sliced (yes that can happen in a fast-paced gameplay), and if you hit it, depends on the bomb type, it can deduct points, prevent combos, some can give you special bonus and one like the Red Bomb can end the round, which means game over.I think that Fruit Ninja is going to be awesome in VR. One reason that I'm pretty sure that it's going to rock in VR because I've already read gamer's opinion about ZenBlade, which is an upcoming fruit-slicing game (the developer refers to it as sword simulation action game) for HTC Vive. ZenBlade was developed by Atomic VR, and it's a bit different because it features more realistic visuals, there are far fewer fruits than Fruit Ninja, and it mostly based on, more physics-based motion where the fruits are coming towards varying in different height and speeds.

Fruit Ninja feels more arcade-style and more intensive in that sense, which what I think made it so popular in the first place. However, I think that many gamers actually like the more realistic gameplay that feels more real, like you are slicing fruit in real life.Like in the other Fruit Ninja games, you have a global leaderboard where you can brag you high score and try to do your best to improve your position in the leaderboard. Fruit Ninja VR has three different game modes: Classic (how many points you can achieve), Arcade (score as many points as you can in 60 second) and Zen (no bombs, just fruits). There are also combos which the player can execute, and this happens when the player slice three or more fruits in a single slicing motion. This means that the player needs to aim to hit as many fruits as possible and sustain his combos to get rewarded with additional bonus points.

There are also power-ups that can be equipped before the game starts and give you an advantage by saving you from bombs, giving you extra points, etc.In the trailer video, we can see a fruit combos, critical hit (happens in random), Combo Blitz, Awesome blitz - all the great stuff from the original game.