Blast Fruit Into An Oblivion!
June 20, 2011
Fruit Blast ($0.99) by MEDL MOBILE is a highly entertaining game for all ages. A crazy monkey is on the loose and it is your job to track him down. Unfortunately the monkey has gotten into zoo’s fruit supplies and has decided to throw them at you. Equipped with a pea-shooter, players must defend themselves from the flying fruit by blasting them into oblivion.
Aim by tilting your iPhone and lining up the crosshairs with the fruit, then shoot by tapping the gun icon in the bottom right corner. Make sure to watch ammo levels, and re-load when necessary. The monkey starts by throwing soft fruits like oranges and bananas. Later stages introduce pears, watermelons, coconuts and more. These are harder to shoot down so visit the Fruit Stand to buy more advanced weaponry.
If fruit is not shot it smashes against the screen and obscures your view. Squeegees are available to clear the screen of smashed fruit. Smashed fruit also reduces the health. Some fruits are more harmful than others; be careful to avoid those harder fruits. After clearing the screen, health is restored to 100%.
Players earn seeds for every fruit they shoot down. Seeds are used to buy things from the Fruit Stand. Bonus seeds can be earned by shooting fruit without missing. The seeds awarded increase by a multiple each time a fruit is shot in a row, so a streak of 20 or so shots can earn 300+ seeds for each fruit. These streaks are the best way to earn extra seeds. Aside from unlocking more weapons, players can also unlock different background levels. The first level is by the zoo, others include city and forest backgrounds.
For those who have experience with guns, they know the appeal of shooting moving targets over stationary ones. Fruit Blast capitalizes on this. Fruit is flung in a random manner, with every piece having a different trajectory. The game is highly entertaining and has a very high replay value. The levels become progressively more difficult so it remains challenging.
One thing that confused me was the scoring system for the fruit. Oranges (the first fruit thrown) are worth 10 points but then pears (the third fruit) are worth less and they’re harder to shoot down. This doesn’t make much sense to me, but if you can enlighten me please do in the comments.
There are several technological problems with Fruit Blast. First it is supposed to be an iPhone and iPod touch game, yet it wouldn’t open on my iPod. This may be because mine is the third generation, but I downloaded it twice with no luck. GameCenter also does not work. This is probably a bug, but an error message is displayed whenever the app is opened saying that it cannot connect. Finally, while playing the tilt feature became un-calibrated so holding my iDevice level had the cross hair off center. I fixed this by aborting the current level and restarting it. An easy fix, but still inconvenient.
Overall, Fruit Blast is a fun game for everyone. The gameplay is simple, fun, and extremely entertaining. I highly recommend this game for iPhone users who love fruit but are tired of slashing it.
