Fruit salad is nice. It is - in fact - one of my favourite salads, I would say. But for a fruit-only salad to work, the fruit needs to be carefully selected, finely sliced and have just the right amount of both acidity and sweetness. A good fruit salad is wonderful - but High Fructose is not that salad (yet), it needs a few more turns in the kitchen before it can become a salad worthy of a true fruit connoisseur.
Salad this, salad that - we'll leave it at that, because it really has nothing to do with the game. High Fructose is a movement-based roguelite that plays with the concept of the good old Fruit Ninja game. Here we play, literally, as a fruit ninja. Equipped with a terribly(hehe) sharp katana, Tsuyoi the fox flies through the air with the help of double jumps, wall jumps and dashes in slow motion. All this while angry strawberries, snake bananas, rolling coconuts and flying pumpkins are doing their best to slay the fox.
In the meantime, you must also complete recipes, such as "Strawberry Jam", which rewards you with some HP after chopping three strawberry enemies into sludge. There are a plethora of different recipes with different buffs and rewards. It's important to remember to switch recipes during the round though - otherwise you'll lose the bonus, and you don't want to do that.
Fun concept, absolutely. It's colourful, plays nicely and looks good. The music is okay too - although it gets a bit tiring and repetitive after a while. High Fructose could definitely be something - because it has a backbone, a solid one, that can carry it through the Early Access stage and blossom into a tree that actually bears fruit. But right now it feels more like that apple tree you planted last spring that the deer have chewed beyond recognition.
The paths in High Fructose are procedurally generated. It's a good idea, absolutely, but when the game relies so much on you to keep moving by running on walls, dashing there and double jumping here, it fails a bit. The courses feel ill-conceived, not only because they are not hand-built but also because they are so vertical when 96% of all enemies are down on the ground. A game of this type would benefit from a clearer structure and design when it comes to the layout of the courses, plain and simple.
Something else that is a bit sad is that the katana is the only weapon you actually get the pleasure of controlling. The rest of the weapons you unlock fire automatically - either via a robot that follows you or by being mounted in the side of your field of view. I suspect the developer has looked a bit at Vampire Hunters and how it handled an inordinate amount of different weapons at once - but it doesn't feel nearly as rewarding here. The other weapons are just something that's there, on the periphery, and nothing you need to think about. There are a lot of fun weapons though, from good old AK-47s to panda guns, but I wish you'd been made to feel more involved in their use.
If you don't stay away from enemies, you'll see this screen pretty soon.
I also have a little problem with the difficulty level of this game. It feels... odd. It's hard to put my finger on exactly what it is that doesn't work, but I suspect it has to do with the amount of enemies that spawn in the game's later courses. Running around on the ground and actually trying to slay them manually is just forgettable - because before you can say"fruit salad" you're surrounded and taking damage from all sides. The only winning recipe is to stay away, at a distance, and wait for the automatic weapons to do their job. It's not much fun at all. Couple that with the fact that the ground is thick with lava, and it's pretty clear that ninja parkour is the only way to succeed.
Now, we should definitely keep in mind that this is an Early Access title, but the game is a little too empty of content. There's only one playable character and eight courses to get through. There will be more, of course, but at the time of writing, it's not something I can recommend due to some kind of overload on the content front.
Banana worms are not particularly pleasant creatures - quite the opposite, in fact.
The story is somewhere in this rather messy fruit gag and involves superhero animals taking on evil fruit. It works, absolutely, but it's not going to win any BAFTAs for best storytelling. It doesn't need to, by any means, but the story elements present in the game feel like forced padding and I'd rather the effort put into it had gone into developing more enjoyable gameplay instead.
That said, not to mention that this is a game that is still in development. In its current state, I can't recommend High Fructose to anyone, really. But give the developer, Chazak Games, a few more years in the workshop and I think they can turn it around and make High Fructose into something really nice. Because it has an appealing style, a fun concept, and good movement that is only marred by the fact that the courses aren't quite up to scratch. It could be good, sure, but now? It has a bit too many minus points where the aforementioned procedurally generated courses, the strange difficulty level, the clumsy weapon handling and the scarce content drag down the impression too much - unfortunately.