Fantastic Fruit Slot Review

Enjoy some classic spins with Fantastic Fruit by Merkur Gaming, an online video slot that goes back to the basics of good old arcade gambling games. The reels are filled with a cocktail of retro fruit machine icons, appealing to those spinners who like their games with no silly frills. There are no bonus thrills either for that matter, with no free spins or even wild wins. This really is an out and out classic slot machine.

The top jackpot prize in Fantastic Fruit is 500 coins, which is not exactly the most attractive return in the business. However, with 64 paylines over the 5 reels, players will have plenty of opportunities to find a winner. And if you’re not entirely satisfied with the size of the prize, then you can take matters into your own hands with a couple of gamble games.

Back to Basics

Modern slot machines come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, with a variety of exciting themes to attract punters will different tastes and personal preferences. However, sometimes you just can’t beat a classic. Fantastic Fruit is an online video slot that draws inspiration from the arcade slot machines of old, featuring a full range of fruit icons such as cherries, lemons, oranges, plums, grapes and watermelons. The slot also features an iconic 777 symbol, just to make sure there is no confusing the game for anything other than a retro slot machine.

From a visual point of view, this slot machine is fairly bog standard, with no particularly mind-blowing animations or eye-catching 3D effects. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however. After all, the main appeal of playing a retro slot machine online is to get some of that old arcade game nostalgia. If you are after something with a little bit of every oomph in the graphics department, then you could check out a slot machine like Fruit Zen by BetSoft or Hot Twenty by Amatic.

64 Ways to Win

Very few classic slot machines offer as many as 64 paylines, be they online or in a land based casino. Fantastic Fruit, on the other hand, presents exactly that – 64 different ways to land a winning combination of icons.

Ostensibly, this would suggest that the game would offer loads of frequent wins, keeping the punter’s betting balance topped up without too much of a wait. However, the opposite is true in this high variance slot machine. The reason for this is the fact that the symbols tend to appear stacked on the reels, making uncommon for matching icons to appear on adjacent reels from left to right. However, when three or more symbols do appear, they will potentially offer multiple wins at once, making it well worth the wait.

Due to this, the value of the wins appear to be a bit underwhelming. The game’s biggest jackpot, for example, weighs in as a total bet multiplier worth 100x which is paid whenever five 777 symbols appear in a row. Some of the smallest prizes in the game won’t even return the total bet; three cherries or lemons pay a total bet prize of 0.2x.

The smallest possible wager in Fantastic Fruit is 0.05 credits and the largest is 5.00 credits. This means that there isn’t a particularly wide scope for high rolling gamblers to get stuck into the action.

Worth the Risk?

Like a true retro slot machine, Fanastic Fruit by Merkur Gaming doesn’t rely on any gimmicky bonus features to keep punters entertained. While this will please slot machine purists, it does mean that punters won’t be able to boost their wins with free spins, wild wins or multipliers.

Luckily, this online slot does boast a special gamble feature – two, in fact. After every win in the game, a couple of “Gamble” buttons will appear, the first of which presents the opportunity to double your win from the previous spin by guessing whether a plying card is red or black. Sounds simple enough but any wrong guess will result in the original prize being squandered. The second gamble option provides something a bit more unique, with a ladder game of different prizes. Your prize will move up or down with each gamble but make sure you don’t go all the way to the bottom.

The Final Verdict

Fantastic Fruit is a solid retro video slot, offering some interesting 64-payline gameplay to punters who want some of that arcade gambling aesthetic. That said, with a jackpot of just 100x and a max bet of 5 credits, the game is not the most rewarding in the business.