Fruit Combinator Slot

Fruit Combinator Base Game and Features

Fruit Combinator breaks with a convention right from the off. Whereas most classic fruit-machine games sport vivid tones of reds and purples as if held in some casino back room, ReelPlay’s contribution whisks players far away from planet Earth and up amid some dream-like realm where clouds drift past against a piercing blue sky.

It’s enough to send players into a trance, forgetting the main reason they’re here is to spin the reels in the hope of chasing the 6,223x the bet max win up for grabs up in the sky.

Scored low on the volatility index by its creator, Fruit Combinator’s gaming takes place over 6 reels which begin with only the first 3 rows active. All that changes once one of the game’s main features steps in, as explained below.

The game’s low-value symbols are depicted as playing card ranks from 10-A while paying up to 10x the bet for 6OAK winning lines are a strawberry, watermelon, orange, plum, and a bunch of grapes. Available on all reels except the first is the Wild symbol, performing its regular function of symbol substitution.

To trigger a payout you need to line up a minimum of 3 identical symbols across one of the 707 pay lines in play over consecutive reels beginning at the leftmost reel. Hit a win, and a new ‘revolutionary style of gameplay’ dubbed ‘Reverse Cascades’ (Yggdrasil’s words, not ours), triggers.

Instead of winning symbols popping off the grid, you guessed it, here, it’s the losing symbols that get removed. This causes symbols that were part of any winning combos to fall to the bottom of the board – in what has been termed an Explosion.

Morphs kick in next. If, after an Explosion, the bottom of the grid contains more than one type of symbol (except Wilds and Scatters), they all Morph into the most lucrative symbol present.

Next, let’s talk about Boosters. Boosters step in to introduce further symbols onto the grid to create a new winning combo if any previous winning symbols are no longer in a winning setup following Explosions and Morphs.

With Explosions, Morphs, and Boosters over, Drops now take centre stage. These operate by dropping a new symbol onto any reel that is less than 5 rows high in symbols. Now, all winning symbols bar scatters are Exploded off the board, as well as those that match any winning symbols but don’t contribute to a win themselves. Furthermore, any symbols that land in winning positions plus all scatters in view remain. It’s possible to keep Drops rolling until each reel is covered in symbols, and a payout is triggered once the feature comes to an end.

Fruit Combinator Free Spins

To bring Free Spins into play you need two conditions in place: Drops to have completed and 3 scatters left in view. If this occurs, then the value of those scatters is paid out before Free Spins begin. Then, the play unfolds in Hold & Win style with 3 refilling lives where only scatters can land.

Fill the board in scatters or run your lives down to zero and the round concludes with your eventual prize awarded. Possible values of scatter symbols are either 1-100 your stake or 10x, 50x, 250x, or 2,000x the bet via the Mini, Minor, Major, and Grand bonus, respectively.

Fruit Combinator: Our Verdict

Not for the first time recently, a sense of deja-vu crept in having taken Fruit Combinator for a whirl. Some furious digging eventually lit up the lightbulb: the slot is for all intents and purposes a reskin of former ReelPlay entry, Professor Clark’s Combinator. So marks are lost already for the game’s clone status despite the divergent themes employed.

Secondly, flipping cascades on their head isn’t the worst idea, but hardly the bastion of innovation the game professes to be. Enticing players to ‘Unleash a new level of excitement with the revolutionary style of gameplay’ is a bit of a stretch and borderline embarrassing – especially if we’ve already seen these parts before in a separate guise. If we were to put our neck on the line, we’d hazard a guess that this part was not scripted by Yggdrasil but by ReelPlay themselves, despite being displayed proudly on the former’s website.

There is somewhat novel gaming going on here what with all the Exploding, Morphing, Boostering, and Reverse Cascading, which may tempt players keen to quench their thirst via alternative fruit machine gaming, but all up, Fruit Combinator came across as more of a rotten bunch of grapes than the sweetest fruit cocktail we’d had the pleasure of sampling.