The other day I played Fruit Fusion, a cute indie-game by Apex Mango Studio, or MangoBits Studios, an indie-creator we follow on Instagram. When I played, I was in the company of Wayne and Samuel, as we had found that streaming games while we play them, even if we are reviewing them, was a bunch of fun, much like when we played Piece By Piece with Eli (video on that at some point!).
First impressions & gameplay
Most importantly, Fruit Fusion is a fun game! It took inspiration from Suika, a physics-based puzzle game where players drop various fruits into a container, matching identical fruits to merge them into larger ones. Fruit Fusion built upon the concept with new abilities, cards, and more fruit! The claw mechanism was very smooth, it brought the fun of the claw machine into a game, with physics that support the lanky movement of the claw, and unpredictable physics of dropping objects (in this case fruit!). I played it for a couple hours, and got really stuck into it. I wasn't very good at the start, and didn't use my brain well to calculate my next moves properly, but eventually I got into a good swing of things, and was popping fruit like crazy! I even got the watermelon, which was cause for celebration. Had to cut that celebration out to keep the video concise, but lets just say I've never said watermelon that much in my life before.
Each of the three abilities were useful, 2 (destroy all trash) and 3 (destroy a card) certainly seemed the most handy, but ability 1 (drawing cards) was not at all useless. There is a good replayability to the game, with new unlocks with each run. When I go back to playing it, I still have quite a lot to unlock! So one could dip in and out of this game every so often for leisure time, and still have something fun to get! The artwork was very arcadey and supported the chill casualness of the game, as did the music!
A few thoughts
I didn't quite understand if there was more to the card system, with there being a deck building element to the game. That wasn't made so clear but if there is, or could be, this could definitely add a new element of planning to the game which would introduce more strategy! You could pick up multiple cards at a time, which was good for making fast moves or approaches, but sometimes it was unclear whether you had or had not, picked up multiple fruit. I assumed they were falling in order of click, but I often forgot which order I had clicked, which was a me problem and not a game problem!
Overall, definitely worth a play if you want to chill out! The best part for me was how mesmerising the gameplay is, you would get sucked into playing just to see how far you could get. An empty claw machine meant a fresh new potential for scoring opportunities. Thanks for reading, and thank you Apex Mango Studios! Fruit Fusion is available on Steam for free if you want to give it a try.
