Monkeying around
The words ‘Match Three’ strike terror in to my heart. It’s not that I dislike the icon matching games on the App Store, it’s just that there are so many of them. So seeing those words in the description for Fruit Tumble, I feared the worst.
Luckily for me, Fruit Tumble is a take on the classic Luxor game where items roll down a loop and the idea is to match the colours in threes to make them disappear before they all back the queue up. It’s also one of the better Luxor style games out there on the App Store.
In the game, several monkeys hang from fruit trees by their tails and a long twisty vine hangs below them. Small birds then push different fruits along the vine, trying to reach the big bird at the end, while your monkeys hold different individual fruits.
The aim is to place these single fruits in the right pattern as the line of fruit is rolled along. Three or more in a row will make all the fruit in that pattern disappear. This keeps going until all the fruit is gone or the fruit reaches the bigger bird.
A good score relies on making fruit disappear as quickly as possible, before the birds push it down the vine. As vines get longer and the trail of fruit stretches further, more monkeys are added to help remove all the food from the vine. It soon gets pretty frantic, pulling those poor monkeys by their tales as quickly as possible to reach the fruit (and, in my case, often getting it in the wrong pattern, which only makes the line longer).
Special items sometimes appear to help the monkeys out, but they often seem few and far between and don’t really help much. Levels do ramp up in difficulty later on, though, and with 45 levels to complete it may take you a while to play through the game. A traditional three star rating helps with longevity for those who feel the need to complete their games 100%.
Fruit Tumble isn’t exactly original, there are a number of Luxor clones around and it doesn’t really do anything new, but what it lacks in originality it makes up for in charm and colour.
- Sound: 7
- Graphics: 8
- Gameplay: 7
- Longevity: 7
7
Good
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