We’ve been eagerly waiting for an opportunity to put Fruit Ninja HD through its paces since we posted the trailer earlier this week. Now we have it, we’re a little disappointed; with the exception of the two player split screen mode, there’s nothing new in this version. You’re effectively paying five times the price for a mode that you may not play all that often.

Fruit Ninja HD shares the same problem that we have with Super 7 since it went universal; that is the game is just simply bigger for the sake of it. All of the graphics and game objects have simply been scaled up, losing some of the sharpness from the original small screen edition. Indeed, there is little difference between running the iPhone version pixel doubled and the iPad version, except that the background and interface elements stretch to the width and height of the screen.

There’s no additional user interface improvements here; the only thing that’s completely new is the split screen multiplayer mode. This is fun for a number of reasons; you can play either Zen or Classic mode and adjust the speed and how long you play the game for. As the game now supports up to eight inputs you have much more freedom over how you slice up the fruit; Classic mode even allows you to fire bombs over at your opponent to see if you can trick them into losing a life or two. Your cumulative scores are tracked so you can do best out of five (or further games if you like) across both modes.

If you already have Fruit Ninja for your iPhone or iPod touch then it’s hard to recommend purchasing this HD version. That’s not to say it’s a bad game; indeed, slicing up fruit is as fun as it ever was on the small screen, plus if the developer is as committed to updating this version as often as the iPhone version then you could be in for new modes, backgrounds and blades fairly often. But multiplayer alone isn’t enough to justify buying this game; there’s many more fantastic iPad exclusive games that you could be enjoying instead.

This review covers content that’s exclusive to the iPad version; you can catch further detail on the gameplay from our initial review.

Media gallery

• 
• 
• 
• 

More by this developer

Monster Dash, C

Review by Ben Briggs, August 19, 2010

Fruit Ninja, B

Review by Ben Briggs, May 11, 2010

Why not try...

---

• 

  iSlash

• 

  Knight's Rush

• 

  Robot Rampage

• 

  Samurai: Way of the Warrior