Fruit Frenzy slot review

The reels stand on a purple backdrop of stars, like the canvas of a tent seen from inside, and the buttons are the usual ones of the "Real Series" (the studio's games with a random jackpot). Two arrows move the "coin" from 0.01 up to 0.25, two more switch lines on and off, and "Autoplay" turns the reels until you stop it. The ticket says "admit one".

The screenshot comes from that demo seat ("Fun Play" stands at the top left), with 0.05 on each of the twenty-five lines, 1.25 a spin, and a "scatter" win of 1.25 for two Frenzy logos, while the drawing, which is of 2008, has the thick lines of its time.

The symbols are the troupe: the banana in the top hat, an orange clown, a plum with a box of popcorn, a pair of goggles, balloons, a clown car, an admit-one ticket, the watermelon cannon with its fuse lit and the two logos, Fruit and Frenzy, which are the scatters. The pineapple, the wild, and the strawberry, the daredevil, were off stage when the picture was taken.

The pineapple is the "wild" (a joker that stands in for any symbol but the two logos) and pays in its own right: two, three, four or five on a line are worth 10, 200, 2,000 or 10,000 coins, and the leap from four to five is the one that a player remembers. At 0.25 per coin, five pineapples come to 2,500 in the money of the account!

The two logos are "scatters" (symbols that pay wherever they land) from two upwards, worth a multiple of the total bet that the paytable puts at up to 200 times for the Fruit logo and 100 for the Frenzy, and our screenshot shows the smallest of them.

The strawberry is the bonus symbol, and five of them open the "Daredevil Bonus", in which the player takes three shots at the Daredevil Strawberry (the human cannonball of the show) and wins twenty-five "free spins" at most, each paid at a multiplier of three; the scatter wins are tripled too, and the round can be retriggered from inside.

Above the reels, the counter that never stops moving is the "random jackpot" of the Real Series (the progressive prize of the series): a slice of each bet goes into the pot, which one spin, picked by the machine itself, collects whole, whether or not a line has paid and whatever the stake. In the demo the counter rises as it would for money, but it pays play credit.

Fruit Frenzy has no single "RTP" (the share of all stakes that a slot returns over millions of spins): RealTime Gaming leaves the setting to the casino, which picks one of the values that the studio allows, 97.5 per cent being the highest; it prints the figure, if at all, inside the help screens of the game. Few players open those screens, and we would do so before the first deposit.

Volatility is low to medium here, which the data say and our demo confirmed: the balance climbs and dips in small steps, and the scatters and the pineapple keep it breathing between one bonus and the next. A player with fifty in credit who bets 0.02 a line with every line open (0.50 a spin) has one hundred spins before the tent empties. At the top coin of 0.25, 6.25 a spin, the same fifty is gone in eight.

The circus tours the casinos that carry RealTime Gaming, and the Deckmedia houses have it on the bill, SlotoCash and Uptown Aces first, then Fair Go, Ozwin, Uptown Pokies and Decode, all of them serving the international market under a Curaçao licence, an "offshore" one, as the trade says. What that licence guarantees is the subject of our SlotoCash review, while the offers of those houses sit on our no-deposit list for the whole world.

Those offers change without notice, and the casino's own page is the one that counts; the demo, our way in, is there at most of these houses once an account exists, behind the "Fun Play" button of our screenshot. The other way into the tent without buying a ticket is a "free chip" (a bonus of a few dollars that asks for no deposit).

Read first its "wagering" (how many times the sum must be bet before a withdrawal) and its "max cashout" (the most that the house will pay out of it), two terms our free spins page takes apart. A slot of low to medium volatility is a fair companion for such terms, since small payments keep the chip breathing while the bets are counted. A chip of fifteen with a wagering of twenty-five calls for 375 in bets, 750 spins at 0.50, and the circus can afford that many!

Fruit Frenzy is a slot of 2008 that has kept its good humour, and it asks little: a small coin, thick lines and patience for the cannon. On the credit side stand the pineapple's 10,000 coins, the Daredevil Bonus and a volatility that spares small budgets; on the debit side, a return that the studio leaves to the casino and a drawing of its age.

If an evening at small stakes is what you are after, this is in our view among the friendlier tents of the Real Series, and the demo seat is the place to begin, as it was for us. Deeper water is what Crystal Waters offers, the one slot that we rate, Thunderstruck Gold Blitz Extreme, holds 4 stars out of 5, and the rest sits on the page of our slot and game reviews (18+). That is the whole programme.