Hands On: Job Simulator and Pesky Produce Collide in Shooty Fruity

You can imagine the design discussions at nDreams. “I quite like Job Simulator,” posits one developer, “and static shooting galleries work well in virtual reality. Couldn’t we, like, combine the two?” Voila! Shooty Fruity falls from a tropical tree.

Unsurprisingly, this is a fun but derivative PlayStation VR game that will entertain in bursts but won’t win any awards. As a supermarket clerk your job is to scan various everyday items and drop them in the packing bay, which would be easy if it wasn’t for the mutated fruit that keeps coming at you.

As you scan items you’ll earn points which unlocks weapons, allowing you to fend off the fleshy threat. It then becomes a frantic balancing act of how you want to use your hands: are you going to scan as quickly as possible with both hands – or keep a gun handy in your right palm? Maybe you should dual-wield?

The game’s very good at putting you under intense pressure quickly, and performing all of the tasks asked of you is part of the fun. You’ll have played games like this in virtual reality before – it’s not massively dissimilar to Job Simulator really – but in combining existing ideas it delivers something fresh.

Well, it’s much fresher than the giant melons that try to attack you anyway – they appeared past their sell-by date once we’d pumped their flesh full of shotgun slugs. Visually it all looks nice in virtual reality, though the angry fruit models do look a little bit like the kind of characters you’d expect to find on the packaging for Aldi’s own-brand version of Munch Bunch fromage frais.

Will you be checking out (!!!) Shooty Fruity when it launches later this year? Smoothie talk your way into the comments section below.