Fruit Combinator

Time for some healthy eating folks and a metaphorical chance to consume 1 of your 5 a day thanks to Yggdrasil Gaming partner studio ReelPlay in a video slot titled Fruit Combinator – a fruity-themed slot which uses a multi-faceted mechanic ReelPlay has called a ‘reverse cascade’. As well as this ‘revolutionary’ feature (again, ReelPlay’s words), Fruit Combinator comes with other extras like Explosive Reactions, Symbol Morphs, and Win Boosters.

Fruit slots aren’t exactly famous for creating intricate worlds full of depth, hidden meaning, and elaborately rendered scenes. Fruit Combinator takes this idea to an extreme and is played from a pilot’s eye view of the world, as if staring out of a cockpit window, watching the world go by in a swirl of clouds and blue skies. Seriously, Fruit Combinator’s background is animated as if the three-fifths full game grid is hurtling through the stratosphere. Four static prize values sit on the left-hand side of the screen, the UI on the right. It’s either super clean or super boring; take your pick, and let’s move to the numbers.

So, numbers, and arguably the most important of them all is up first, where the default theoretical return to player comes out at 96.1%. It’s driven by a low volatile math model and hosted on a game grid which has 6 reels, each reel possessing 5 positions. However, base game spins always begin with 3 rows of active symbols and 2 rows of blank spaces. How those empty spaces can be filled is explained below in the features section. Till then, bet selection varies from 20 p/c to £/€40 per spin, without a bonus buy or ante bet in sight.

Loads of fruit are in sight as the pay table is full of them. However, the low pays are actually 10-A card royals, while the high pays are where we come across a strawberry, watermelon, orange, plum and a bunch of grapes. Landing 6-of-a-kind winning way awards players 0.5 to 1 times the bet for the low pays and 1.2 to 10 times the bet for the highs. Wilds appear in Fruit Combinator, too, on all but the leftmost reel. Wilds substitute for all symbols except the scatter.

Fruit Combinator: Slot Features

Here’s how Fruit Combinator works. Winning combinations are created when matching pay symbols land on 3 or more adjacent reels from the left side of the grid onwards. When this happens, the non-winning symbols are removed (except scatters), and the winning symbols drop to the bottom of the grid. This is known as the Explosion part of the sequence.

Next in the sequence are Morphs. If there is more than one symbol type in view sitting at the bottom of the grid, all pay symbols morph into the highest value pay symbol in view. Wilds and scatters are excluded from morphing.

Up next is Boosters. If, after Explosions and Morphs, any previous winning symbol is not in a winning position anymore, additional matching symbols are added to make it a winning symbol.

Following Boosters is Drops. Here, a new symbol is dropped onto the top of each reel that has less than 5 symbols. Any dropped symbols which do not match or substitute the current paying symbol explodes. Any dropped symbol that does match or substitute but does not land in a winning position also explodes. Scatters are always kept, as are any symbols that match or substitute in paying positions. If the total kept symbol count is higher than the count of the previous Drop, then an extra Drop occurs (or in the base game before any Morphs or Boosters if it is the first Drop). Wins are paid when no more Drops are activated.

Free Games

Free games are triggered when at least 3 scatter symbols land and after base game Drops have been completed. The prize value on each scatter symbol is paid, and 3 free games are awarded. Landing a new scatter symbol resets the spin count to 3. At the end of any free game, the prize value on any scatter is paid. Scatter symbols have values of 1-100x the bet or have the Mini, Minor, Major, or Grand bonus worth 10x, 50x, 250x or 2,000x the bet, respectively.

Fruit Combinator: Slot Verdict

For better or for worse, fruit is one of those things that gamblers are likely to bump into sooner or later at regular intervals when playing online slots. Fruit seems to have been around since practically the dawn of the slot phenomenon and is likely to be there until the curtains close on them if this should ever occur. The good thing is software developers have really widened the net to encompass a huge range of topics as time has progressed so that players have hundreds if not thousands of non-fruit options to choose from.

Bringing it back to the topic at hand, fruit lovers are spoiled for choice, yet Fruit Combinator might not be at the top of a huge number of fruit fans’ lists. For the most part, it is basically a clone of another ReelPlay’s Professor Clank’s Combinator. Perhaps the earlier game struck a chord with enough players to justify a reskin. With the popularity of fruit, you’d imagine Fruit Combinator might well reach a broader audience than Professor Clank’s Combinator was able to. If fruit isn’t the be-all and end-all, though, Fruit Combinator’s theme isn’t as original or as interesting as Professor Clank’s Combinator. It’s just fruit, clouds, and recycled gameplay. Hardly rip-roaringly exciting stuff to be screaming off the rooftops about.

And so the review comes to a close on a game which was okay to play around with for a bit but one possessing little that was very remarkable. In fact, and we’re not trying to be mean or anything here, but Fruit Combinator sort of just came across as basically what it was. That is, essentially, a clone which is more generic and less original than the slot it was ported over from.