Super Fruit Fall Review

You can do a lot of things with fruit. You can eat it (the intended purpose), you can pick it off of trees, you can play catch with it, or there are any other multitude of things that it could be used for. One that I never would think of would be to put a bunch of different types of fruit in a box and rotate the box to try to match them. Evidently Codemasters and I do not think alike, for they did have that idea and they made it into a video game, Super Fruit Fall. At first glance, it sounds like it would be boring. Is that an accurate assessment? Read on to find out.

Graphically, Super Fruit Fall is nothing to get too excited about. The appearance of the game is very bright and cheery and the level of detail is easily sufficient enough that you can tell the different types of fruit apart by what they look like. At the same time that it must be conceded that this game is graphically simplistic, it must also be conceded that most puzzle games generally are and require no more than that. Overall, these graphics are pretty good for a puzzle game, and a budget one at that.

On the sound front, simplistic would also be the proper word. The musical themes are good, but there are not very many of them. Sound effects are few, but they are fine as well. What little voice acting there is in this game is done okay, but it does get old hearing that high-pitched female voice saying “time is running out” after the first few times you hear it. Still, there are no atrociously bad things about the sound in this game.

The gameplay is simple enough. You have a bunch of fruit in an environment with walls set up in such a way as to make it difficult to match up the same type of fruit. Your objective is to remove every piece of fruit from the environment within the time limit by grouping them into groups of three or more of the same type of fruit. You lose if you run out of time or if you leave yourself in a position where the level is unbeatable. You move the fruit by rotating the environment, and it can be rotated ninety degrees in either direction or one hundred eighty degrees.

The game can be controlled with the L and R buttons, the D-pad, or the buttons. Oddly enough, there is no touch-screen control whatsoever. There are plenty of levels, and the increase in difficulty is fairly even throughout. What will make this game last so long, however, is not the quantity of levels itself, but the sheer difficulty of them. The levels are divided into five islands of fifteen levels each, with each island having more difficult levels than the one before it.

The arcade mode in this game is the main mode. Once you have beaten all of the levels on an island, they are unlocked into the practice and time-trial modes so you can try to improve your times on them. In the arcade mode, score is kept, but if you fail at levels three times, the game is over. When this happens, you can continue from whatever point you got to, but your score will start over again at zero.

On the chance that you should have trouble, you can ask the game to assess the situation and figure out the puzzle for you. However, doing this will cause your score to reduce rapidly while the game figures it out for you, and it always takes the game a while to figure out what you should do, so you are usually better off to just not use this and keep guessing yourself.

For those of you who like multiplayer, Super Fruit Fall is a rarity on the DS in that it can be played multiplayer, not just through single-card download play, but with two people using the same DS system. Each player has a screen, and one player uses the D-pad while the other uses the buttons. I did not have a chance to try the game this way, and I can imagine it might be a bit uncomfortable, but the idea of multiplayer with one system is nice nonetheless.

All things considered, this game will not last forever. However, for the exceedingly low price you can find it for, it is a good choice for those of you who like to think. So, if you fancy yourself a great thinker, make your way to Gamestop (this game, for whatever reason, is Gamestop exclusive if the price tag I saw on it can be believed) and pick up a copy of this game.