By now I’m sure you’ve heard of the extremely popular phenomenon known as Fruit Ninja HD, right? Well, if you haven’t, it’s a game with an extremely simple premise: You slice a whole bunch of fruit as its thrown up onto the screen, and you try to slice it before it falls off the screen. Pretty simple, right? Fortunately, despite having extremely simple mechanics, it’s a whole lot of good clean fun that anyone regardless of age can enjoy. Halfbrick enjoyed quite a bit of success with this title on the iPad, iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android devices. Don’t own one of those devices? Not to worry, because now you can share all the fun – instead of rubbing your hands all over your phone, you can now slice fruit by waiving your arms frantically at fruit flying on your TV with Kinect!

Fruit Ninja for Kinect is essentially the same thing if you’ve experienced it on any other device. You move, it creates a “slice” and cuts fruit if your movement intersects with the object on the screen. Slicing 3 or more fruits at a time will create combos, and you can chain combos together to build your high score. My mom loves this game, and she’s in her mid 50′s, so it’s no wonder that Halfbrick brought this addictive little game to Kinect. You’ll be swinging your arms relentlessly at waves of apples, oranges, watermelons, bananas, kiwi, mangos, and (in what I believe is exclusive to Kinect) pomegranates that endure multiple hits as a way of ending the stage you’re on, depending on the mode of play you choose.

There’s a whole bunch of different “blades” you can unlock, which are basically the different effects you see when swinging your arms around. Much like the phone version, you can use both arms for maximum fruit slicing. However, in my sessions, I found that Fruit Ninja had some trouble tracking me. This is the first Kinect game that I’ve ever had to turn a light on during the day to play, and even then it wasn’t always 100% accurate with my swings. In its defense, it seemed to work fairly well when watching my step kids play, so maybe it just has a harder tracking a larger person (read: fatty) like me. Despite that, when it worked, it worked just as well as its mobile counterpart, and that’s always good for a few rounds of fruit slicing fun.

I really like that Fruit Ninja Kinect has two player action as well, which means double the hilarity as I watched the kids slap the crap out of each other frantically batting for fruit. That was worth the price of admission alone. Still, if you haven’t played Fruit Ninja yet, I think I’d probably recommend the Kinect version as its got more bells and whistles, so to speak. I noticed there are a lot more unlockables, but a lot less achievements than the mobile version. I’m not sure why, but I’d guess it’s due to the restrictions placed on XBLA games. Still, why is it so hard to move around in the menus in the Sensei’s dojo? I had a ridiculously hard time choosing which blade I wanted to use, as it would constantly scroll too far up or down, and most times I’d swipe down to move the menu bar and it’d go the opposite direction. Maybe my Kinect is dirty or something, but I think that’s just a design flaw.

Another thing I noticed was a real bite of lag when it came to exiting the dojo, as the game would freeze for a second or two as I left the menus. That’s certainly acceptable on a phone, but on your Xbox it’s a little bit unreasonable. Perhaps they’ll fix that with an upcoming patch.

Still, if you like slicing fruit, I certainly recommend Fruit Ninja Kinect as you’ll have a blast flailing around like you’re on fire, and you’ll get a pretty decent arm workout to boot. If you have kids, this is one of the few “must own” Kinect titles, as they’ll have an absolute blast playing this one. However, if you own Fruit Ninja on any other platform, I’m not sure that I can recommend it at $10. If you own Fruit Ninja on another device and you’re on the fence, you may want to consider waiting for Twisted Pixel’s upcoming Kinect game “The Gunslinger” as it will come with a free copy of Fruit Ninja Kinect. Either way, Fruit Ninja Kinect is simple, fun, and quite addictive.

Fruit Ninja Kinect is available on the Xbox Live Marketplace for 800 MSP ($10 USD) and was provided for review by Microsoft.