Fruit Ninja arrives in three servings. The primary mode, Classic, is an endurance game. Fruit flying in the air around you, your challenge is to slash produce to pieces before it falls from sight. Miss three and you’re finished. At first I found myself zigzagging my finger across the screen to slash everything in sight, but soon bombs sneak into the mix, and if you touch one of them, you’re diced.
Classic remains my favorite mode because it lasts as long as you do, which, for me, makes it the quickest challenge.Any way you slice it, Fruit Ninja is one of the most popular mobile games of all time. It’s built around such an unassuming foundation that it lends itself perfectly to those lulls in life when you don’t really want to think about anything. Hell, as fast as the fruit flies, there isn’t time for thinking, just reacting. It’s certainly easy to understand and appreciate the appeal.
Shortly following the advent of the Kinect, Halfbrick released a version of Fruit Ninja that made use of the Xbox 360’s motion control peripheral. While it was generally well-received, it was still a curious decision that seemingly flew in the face of everything the title stood for. After all, this was a game that lent itself to short bursts during downtime; now that you have to lug a coffee table across the living room to get started, well, it’s just a different experience.