Shooty Fruity is a multi-tasking first-person shooter game from nDreams, where we play as a poor worker who must combine his speed as a mall employee with his skills as a mutant fruit pest killer. If you are not big on fruits, this is your game, and the title is available for PSVR, Rift, and Vive.
Story
At Shooty Fruity, we are a mall employee of a department store who works from 9 to 5 wherever required, whether in the checkout area, packaging or tray preparation. If that was not enough with the constant coming and going of products to scan or treat, we are constantly attacked by an army of mutant fruits from which we will have to extract all the juice (by shooting them, of course) without ever forgetting our job as a supermarket employee.
It seems like a bit of a stressful job, right? It is.
The game has an atmosphere that sometimes reminds us of decades ago with some neon and pastel colours that surround the title, from the different locations of the game within the shopping center to a striking and functional initial menu that we will manage through vending machines or others of the style that we saw in the arcades that populated the streets years ago.
In this menu, we can review all kinds of game statistics, compare online scores, buy new weapons and choose the next phase to play from among those we have unlocked.
The rest of the game always maintains the same theme within the shopping center. Despite having a fairly simple visual aspect, it matches quite well with the cartoon aspect of the title, and the definition is correct at all times.
The fruit rebellion
The structure of the game is the classic short-game game, divided into 24 phases of a few minutes (although not all have the same duration) with 3 different challenges in each of them, such as “survive with a percentage of life greater than a certain amount,” “ Get a quantity of juice in a specific time,” “ Scan a minimum number of products,” “ Pop several apples with a specific weapon,” “ Survive X minutes “… and thus endless challenges that in many cases will require our total concentration to achieve them, Since it is not a frustrating game, but it will not be a walk either, so we will have to squeeze ourselves thoroughly to unlock all the phases and even more if we want to get all the stars of the game.
Depending on the number of challenges (stars) that we are getting, more stars will unlock new phases, although overcoming these challenges will not be our only task, since, during each one of them, we will accumulate the amount of juice that we get from popping fruits; Juice that we can later spend on buying new weapons from among the 18 possible ones, with a multitude of variants such as pistols of various types, revolvers, submachine guns, grenades, shotguns … each with its advantages and disadvantages compared to one or the other fruits (It is not what Even execute a small and fragile cherry with a pistol shot to need heavy weapons against more powerful fruits such as the fearsome pineapple, the deceptive bunch of grapes or the heavy but lethal watermelon).
Probably half of what I write sounds like a joke. Still, the game itself does not take anything seriously, maintaining that clearly casual tone that it continually displays, starting with the job offer itself. Published on the official title page with a distinctly comical tone.
Working under pressure
The first phases are quite simple, but soon we will suffer the havoc multitasking can wreak on our brains. In some of the longer sessions, I have ended up “exhausted,” and this Shooty fruity is not Sparc nor the next Sprint Vector. Still, exhaustion comes from the stress of attending to the products that approach us while not losing sight of the cherries that come flying. This giant watermelon approaches slowly rolling in the distance flanked by a group of jumping apples, an elusive lemon that hides to attack us at the worst moment, mangoes that come flying with the face of few friends, a group of hateful limes that come with total determination to get us and so many more fruits than they will complicate our work continuously. All this added to the fact that the bullets from each of our weapons will last us a few seconds,
When we begin to haunt the second half of the game approximately, we will begin to find ourselves with numerous challenges that will require several attempts on our part to overcome them. Still, luckily they will not be in vain even though they choke us again and again because we will also be adding more juice under our belt that will come in handy to increase our arsenal and face the remaining pending challenges a little safer.
There are 3 different types of jobs (always combined with “making juice”) that are divided into the classic cashier that must scan articles, the preparation of trays, where we must place the specific product (s) depending on the compartment or compartments of the trays that they pass in front of us continuously, and the preparation of orders, where we must introduce 3 specific products in their own compartment and once completed, validate the order to start with the next one.
Personally, I have played the games of scanning and preparing orders sitting down, but the games of preparing trays I have preferred to play standing up since the products that we must put on the trays are under our hands, and I could not feel comfortable playing them sitting down.
A fruit-proof arsenal
Before each phase, we can choose the 6 weapons that we will have available during it. However, each of them will have to be unlocked later during the phase with our classic job as a supermarket employee. While the pistols will be unlocked from the first second, to start placing other more powerful weapons from among the 6 chosen in our moving lane, we will have to spend ourselves thoroughly scanning items, mounting trays in the cafeteria or preparing orders in the warehouse.
Apart from unlocking these weapons, in the same way, we will unlock power-ups of various types that will provide different advantages for a few seconds after inserting them in the slot intended for them at the time we believe appropriate, as long as we do not send them, for example, to the bagging area. Confusing them with the rest of the articles, something that will be very easy to happen when the booster disk is mixed with a mountain of items pending to scan mixed with the weapons without bullets that we have been releasing during our eagerness to spread fruit juice on the floors of the Supermarket.
Final Thoughts
After thousands of fruits eliminated during the hours that I have dedicated to the game to perform the analysis, I can say that Shooty Fruity is a wave game with personality and a good variety of weapons and power-ups that make it a lot of fun and that will be a challenge (but it will not frustrate) those who try to get all the stars available in each of the 24 phases available to the game, thus placing themselves in a place to be taken into account for those of us who like these casual proposals for short games without many pretensions, also with the plus of being able to gain immersion with a simple fruit-scented candle of the kind sold anywhere, without the need for a specific face as it happens with RE7, Fallout or Skyrim.
On the opposite side is the fact that despite its great variety of weapons and a good variety of enemies, we must not forget that it could become somewhat repetitive after a while due to the simple nature of the title and the little variety of scenarios; even so, being a game for short games as is the case, these drawbacks are less serious and do not penalize the final evaluation excessively.
