Resistance is Fruitile Strategy Guide and Review

Grade: A

Rogue-Lite Filled with Mutant Fruit destruction

Resistance is Fruitile genuinely surprised me. In my first 5 minutes, I was about to put it down, and it seemed campy and silly. But something clicked, and I ended up getting slightly obsessed and absorbed. In my first couple of hours, I didn’t think beating the game was possible, but somehow, against all odds, I won the game. It was quite a journey to get to the end, and Resistance is Fruitile pulls no punches.

The story is admittedly silly. You are a couple getting married who has had their cake stolen by evil mutated fruit. It’s the husband, wife, or both of them in local co-op mode job to get the cake back. Hordes of mutant/alien fruit are between you and the cake.

The game action is a twin-stick shooter with a top-down view. You can move, dash, have a “juicer” (which is a mine that throws fruit-cutting blades), and have your primary weapon. In addition, you can get power-up cards to increase your abilities, and when your power bar fills up, you can either self-heal or use a super-bullet attack. Resistance is Fruitile takes you through dozens of levels and four unique bosses.

Each room is unique, and the difficulty ramps quickly. Therefore, you need to strategically power up your character throughout the run, or you’ll be soon overwhelmed by the fruity hordes.

Game Strategy starts with the Power-up cards.

I was hooked on the gameplay here and ended up collecting enough material for a strategy guide. So let’s get into the Resistance is Fruitile Strategy!

Core to beating the strategy is an explanation of the “power-up” card system. The cards are randomly ordered on a 7×4 grid and face down to start. There are 28 power-up cards in total, and each card appears twice. If you turn over one of a pair, then you get the first ability on the card. If you turn over its pair, you get a much more powerful Match-two ability.

You can turn over a card and “awaken” the power in one of two ways. First, you can level up by beating rooms, and each time you fill your exp bar you can overturn a card.

Second, you can purchase an awakened card for minerals at the beginning of each larger area. The first card is pretty cheap, but the price quickly rises. Minerals are dropped by the fruit when you slice/dice them and are the only resource you can build up between runs.

How do I match efficiently?

The difficulty is that all the power cards start face-down, and you have no idea where the matches are. If you go through the game randomly, overturning cards, chances are you won’t get the most optimal matches in the correct order to beat the game. Unless you’re extremely talented at bullet hell, the fruit hordes will overwhelm you.

To get around that difficulty, you can save up “minerals” between runs, and there is a vizier at the beginning that allows you to “reveal” cards for 100 minerals a piece. So I suggest saving up about 4000 minerals in-between runs and then prep for a game-winning run by spending down your savings. You should go through the whole card set and then write down where they all are at the outset of the game on a piece of paper. It will cost 2800 to know the location of each card at the outset (well, 2700 if you do process of elimination to know the last one).

Card Awakening Order Suggestion

After knowing where each card is, you can awaken them in the most strategic order. Here is my suggestion for the Awakening order. I would always do the match-two and then go on to the next one.

Suggested Awakening Order

1. Thanks a Bunch
   • Awaken One: Increased Exp Gain
   • Match-two Bonus: Further increase exp gain and increases the mineral drop rate
   • Notes: This is the first thing to get right at the start of the game. If you get this at the very beginning, you’ll be getting many more power card levels throughout the game. This is the first place to go as it unlocks everything else.
2. Power regrowth
   • Awaken One: Increased Power Bar Gain
   • Match-two Bonus: Minerals now also grow your power bar and nearby minerals gravitate towards you.
   • Notes: This, combined with the exp, allows you to keep pace with the enemies in the game. The power bar gain allows you to kick off healing and super bullets more often. The mineral collection assist helps you get enough resources to buy as many power-up cards as possible before things get really crazy.
3. Tough Nuts
   • Awaken One: Increased bullet damage
   • Match-two Bonus: Gain an extra barrel for more damage
   • Notes: This is needed right after the XP and Power Bar upgrades. Having your damage output increased makes everything more manageable in the game.
4. An Apple-a-Day
   • Awaken One: Self-Healing Now Grants a Full-heart
   • Match-two Bonus: Enemy Red bullets do Half-damage
   • Notes: This is a must-have to beat the game. Healing a whole instead of a half a heart will give you some space to take damage. Having the red bullets do the same amount of damage as regular bullets will save your butt in the end game.
5. Hearts
   • Awaken One: Gain an Extra Heart
   • Match-two bonus: Auto-heal half a heart when you complete a room and gain another heart.
   • Notes: Having two extra hearts and healing half-a-heart for each room gives you enough wiggle room to keep up with the horde power. Otherwise, just a couple of hits and you can death spiral quickly.
6. Rapid Fire
   • Awaken One: Increased fire rate
   • Match-two bonus: Further increased fire rate and increased super fire rate
   • Note: More damage output equals better survivability
7. From Concentrate
   • Awaken One: Increased Bullet Range
   • Match-two Bonus: Further Increased Bullet Range and Occasionally fire a homing missile.
   • Notes: This helps stay all the way across the room away from the spread of bullets. As the bullets spread out and travel, it becomes easier to dodge, so distance is helpful.
8. Piercing Bullets
   • Awaken One: Piercing Bullets go through pulp and pith. Bullet damage is halved after piercing.
   • Match-two Bonus: Bullets split after piercing and split bullets do half damage
   • Notes: Having the bullets go through the enemies and to the second line is huge. Even with the half-damage for the second line, you can significantly increase how many enemies per second you are mowing down.
9. Bouncing Bullets
   • Awaken One: Bullets bounce off of walls
   • Match-two Bonus: Bullets bounce off of walls and do double damage after a bounce
   • Notes: Allows you to stay in a safe location and shoot the enemies and also with the match-two allows for increased damage output.
10. Selective Breeding
    • Awaken One: Increased Bullet Size
    • Match-two Bonus: Further increased bullet size, and increased super bullet size
    • Notes: This is not as helpful as you think. It does help with increasing accuracy since the bullet is bigger, but doesn’t further increase damage output. Still, with the bouncing, distance, and piercing upgrades together, the bigger bullet size can help you hit targets more often all around the map.
11. Minefulness
    • Awaken One: Larger Juicer9000 Blast Radius and increase Rate of Fire
    • Match-Two Bonus: Place two Juicers at once
    • Notes: While helpful, the damage output you get from upgrading your main weapon does much more then the Mine upgrades. That’s why I deprioritize this one.
12. Juiced
    • Awaken One: increased Movement Speed
    • Match-two Bonus: Your speed generates a distortion field that slows down enemies
    • Notes: Moving around quicker helps dodge damage and it also helps slow down enemies right around you, but it doesn’t increase damage output or health, so I put this towards the end.
13. Core Competency
    • Awaken One: Fire while Phase Dashing
    • Match-two Bonus: Occasionally Unleash a small burst of bullets when firing during the main phase
    • Notes: Meh, this one helps slightly, but not as much as the damage output and health increases. This one can go towards the bottom in priority.
14. Bottomless Pit
    • Awaken One: Increased Super Duration
    • Match-two Bonus: Further increased super duration and super bullets are enhanced by other upgrades.
    • Notes: When the power bar is full, you can either heal yourself or shoot off super bullets. I generally choose to heal myself and therefore rarely used the super bullet ability and so left this upgrade last. If you use super bullets a lot, then this would be higher on the list.

You become super-powered as you get all of the upgrades, and the game flows without too much trouble. With a lack of good upgrades though, it’s a near-impossible gauntlet of difficulty.

The second to last room, which I think is the hardest in the game, became much more manageable with the upgrade path I suggested above.

Game Boss Guide

In Resistance is Fruitile, you will have to contend with four bosses. However, none of them are too difficult if you have the right power-up cards.

First is Jest’a Peach, and the task here is not too bad. You need to keep your distance and dodge while continuing to attack.

The second is Queena Colada. I suggest taking out the gems at the edge before whittling down the Queen’s hit points. As you get the Queen half health, the Queen starts to spray bullets everywhere, and you need the extra room to maneuver.

The third is the King, and again, I would suggest first taking out the auxiliary gems. Then, focusing on attacking while dodging. If you don’t have good healing and health upgrades, then the King Crispr fight is brutal.

Lastly is the infested cake, where you use the same overall strategy. First, take out the Gems and then focus on the cake. This last battle was surprisingly easy, and I had less trouble with this one than with the King and Queen.

Wrap-up

Overall, Resistance is Fruitile starts slow but quickly builds energy as you go through the rooms. The battles don’t pull their punches, and by the end of a run, you’ll be contending with hordes of fruit coming at you from all sides and angles.

The game felt well-balanced, full of excitement, and generally was a good time. However, I haven’t seen many people write or talk about this game. Therefore, I’m giving it hidden gem status and a high ranking.

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