Fruit Madness Slots
Fruit Madness is a 5-reel, nine payline casino game based on familiar fruit machines of old. Released by the Ash Gaming software platform, the title should appeal to lovers of bright, flashy, old-school slots, the kind of games that don’t take themselves too seriously but nonetheless deliver plenty of entertainment.
Fruit Madness is packed with exciting features, including regularly-hitting free spins, a high-paying wild and a unique bonus symbol that offers multipliers of your stake-per-line. Play your cards right and you might just be walking away with a cool 3,000-credit jackpot.
Getting Started
Fruit Madness is available to play for free or with real money, but we’d always recommend playing a few dummy hands to get a feel for things. You can try it out right here at VegasSlotsOnline, where we have a complete library of free slots. The controls couldn’t be simpler. Press the Stake Up and Stake Down buttons to select a stake-per-line, then Select Lines to regulate how many pay-lines you wish to play: you can play on just one, or all nine. Given that your chosen stake-per-line is multiplied by the number of lines in play, you’re gonna want to select nine for the best possible winnings. The total amount you’ve wagered will then be shown in the Total Stake box in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
While the graphics of the game are pretty basic – indeed, the reel grid looks like it’s been created on Microsoft Paint – the design is in keeping with the game’s no-frills feel. Green leaves ring the screen, with the symbols occupying a yellow reel grid. The controls, meanwhile, appear along the bottom of the screen, resembling buttons on a real-life casino machine.
Going fruity
The reels are chiefly populated by character icons, each being a piece of fruit with a different characteristic. There’s the goggle-eyed purple berry, the cheerful orange, the moustachioed lemon and the gormless watermelon. There’s also a pair of buoyant cherries and an unidentified piece of fruit that more closely resembles a potato.
While the character symbols stick closely to the theme, they are not the best paying in the game. Instead, they yield rather trifling amounts at the lower end of the spectrum. For example, four cherry icons pays just 15, while five isn’t much better at 30. Four lemons is 20, while five is 40, and four oranges is 25, with five yielding 50.
The best paying fruit icon is the, er, potato; this spud pays 50 for four and 150 for five.
Special symbols
Of greater interest is the game’s trio of special symbols. There’s a wild, a scatter and a bonus icon. The scatter is the gold coin, which is helpfully printed with the Free Spins logo. All you need to do is land three or more scatters anywhere on the reels. Three coins grants ten free spins, four gifts 20 and 30 free spins awaits he who can line up five in a row. What’s more, all wins (excluding bonus symbol wins) during free spins are tripled! If you activate the bonus game during free spins, meanwhile, you’ll be allowed to recommence your free spins at the conclusion of the mini-game. The free spins feature can also be re-triggered.
The wild symbol is the Fruit Madness logo, which appears in front of a swirling lollipop. Like regular wilds, this one can substitute for all symbols in the game except the scatter and the bonus. It also pays rather well. Line up three to win 200, four to claim 1,000 or five to net 3,000. And yes, you will take home 9,000 if you can hit five wilds during a round of free spins!
Lastly, there’s the bonus icon. Its function is similar to the scatter, in that you need to find three, four or five on an active pay-line. Do so and you’ll enter the Spotlight bonus game, where you can win some wonderful prizes. In the mini-game, everything depends on where the spotlight lands. Each of the six pieces of fruit represents a different stake-per-line multiplier, although you’re guaranteed some kind of win wherever it lands. The number of prizes you take home depends on how many bonus icons you found in the first instance: three, four or five. Once all your prizes have been collected, your winnings are added to your account balance and the base game resumes.
Fruit Madness? Fruit madness!
With a return-to-player average of 94.26%, Fruit Madness gives players a decent chance of making some strong wins. Though the graphics are ultra simple, the gameplay itself is exuberant and entertainment. We concede though, that it does lack the panache of stronger titles in the range such as Captain Cannon's.
