Splat the Fruit is a self-described “thinking person’s Angry Birds”. It is a physics-based puzzle game that tasks you with squishing an orange by utilizing various tools to build a Rube Goldberg machine that delivers a ball (or balls) across the screen to the aforementioned fruit. Anyone that grew up playing the board game “Mouse Trap” will find building their own contraptions to be a greatly enjoyable experience.
To delve a little deeper into the gameplay, there is an orange located somewhere on screen. There is also a number of iron balls somewhere on the screen floating in the air. You must use a combination of any number of trampolines, expandable girders, bombs, weights, magnets, and various other tools to guide the ball from its starting point to destroy the orange. Each level provides you with a different set of items and a varying amount of each. The strategy lies in trying to figure out exactly how and where you need to place each item to affect the ball to complete the challenge. I’ve found that there can even be multiple ways to place any of your tools to do this, and sometimes you don’t even need to use all of them.
I am a huge fan of puzzle games, and I quickly became addicted to working my way through the game, and often found myself replaying levels to find new ways to Splat the Fruit. It is very satisfying to go through the trial and error of how the ball is going to fall and how you can manipulate that trajectory using the tools available. It is often beneficial for you to release the ball every time that you have placed a new tool to see exactly how it is going to play out before placing the next component.
Splat the fruit offers you two different control schemes- touchscreen for handheld play, and the Joy-Con’s buttons for both modes. I heavily favored using the touchscreen myself, but with a little bit of practice certain aspects of the game are actually better when using a combination of both. This is particularly true when it comes to placing, sizing, and rotating the girders. Also advantageous in both mode is the ability to zoom in and out on the screen using the right analog stick. Both control schemes work well, but the touchscreen is the more intuitive of the two, especially if you frequently game on a smartphone or tablet.
While the core gameplay itself is fun, the game does have its downsides. The graphics are pretty generic and resemble old-school flash games. While the graphics do their job, for the most part, you can see in the picture above that the trampoline is a little hard to make out against the very busy background, and sometimes in handheld mode it is difficult to line up your attach points for the girders and rope because of how dark they are. The developers did try to alleviate this by placing a red/green indicator around the tools as you place them, however, so that you at least know where you can and cannot place any given tool. This doesn’t eliminate the problem, but it makes the game manageable despite its graphical shortcomings.
The other drawback can be found in the sound effects. They all seem to be mixed at different volumes, and some are surprisingly loud. They also start to become annoying very quickly as you progress through each stage. Since puzzle games on handhelds tend to be played most often in spur of the moment, 5-10 minute bursts, this may not always be a concern…but it is still something that you should be aware of.
Overall, Splat the Fruit offers a lot of clever puzzles to solve, and is a unique take on the physics puzzle genre. It reminded me a bit more of a bridge constructor game than Angry Birds, so if you’re more into the former than the latter, I’d definitely recommend adding this gem to your collection. Don’t let the icon and simplistically absurd name fool you, as Splat the Fruit is a solid puzzle experience, even with its sometimes hard to distinguish graphics and annoying sound effects.
