Banana Farm Slot Review
Backseat Gaming takes us to a glorious plantation, where fresh and tasty fruits are ripened to perfection. Hand-picked, ready to tantalise your taste buds, players can choose from a range of fruit, but their speciality just so happens to be of the thick-skinned, long, and yellow variety.
Feast upon as many bananas as you can manage in Banana Farm – a 6×4 video slot with signature Features, multiple Free Spins modes, and a 25,000x max win potential. Since Backseat Gaming came into the spotlight on Hacksaw Gaming’s OpenRGS platform, we’ve come to know their style of gameplay and content.
With each new release after their first instalment, Lord Venom, Backseat Gaming has grown in confidence, branching out and testing the waters of new features and mechanics. While Banana Farm doesn’t look like much thematically, we’re not making any assumptions as to what gameplay will hold.
With a fixed RTP of 96.33% and a high volatility rating, here’s hoping to pluck the 25,000x max win potential from its roots…it’s time to go bananas!
Base Game & Features
Banana Farm is the latest highly volatile instalment from Backseat Gaming, revealing 6 reels, 4 rows, and 14 fixed pay lines. Paytable symbols create wins when 3-6 matching symbols land adjacent reels, starting from reel 1.
Strawberries, Watermelon, and Oranges make up the game’s highest-paying symbols, with Bananas being the highest-paying of them all, followed by A, K, Q, J, & 10 card suits. When a win is evaluated, a fixed payout between 0.2x and 20x your bet is awarded, where applicable.
Furthermore, Wilds & Wild Reels appear on all reels in the base game and individual Free Spins modes, substituting for all symbols as part of a winning combination. Lastly, Bonus Scatters are responsible for triggering either Free Spins mode when enough land within the base game.
Wild Reels
Throughout gameplay, Wild Reels may appear stacked on the reels, carrying a random Multiplier between x2 and x100. Alternatively, during Free Spins, Wild Reels are unable to land naturally. Instead, they need to be unlocked by the Progress Ladder.
If more than 1 Wild Reel is part of the same win, their Multipliers add together before being applied to the win.
Progress Ladder
The Progress Ladder activates during the Go Bananas or Banana Plantation Free Spins modes. Each Progress Ladder has 6 Levels, each requiring 3 Bonus Scatters to fill. Once a Progress Level is filled, +1 Sticky Wild is added to the reel, as well as 1-3 additional Free Spins.
Banana Farm Free Spins
Triggering the Go Bananas Bonus requires 3 Scatters to land in the base game, awarding 10 Free Spins.
In this mode, Wild Reels are only able to land when each Level of the Progress Ladder is achieved. Each unlocked Level will grant +1 Wild Reel to the reels, which remains in view until the end of the session.
Banana Plantation
Alternatively, the Banana Plantation Bonus is activated when 4 Scatters appear in a base game spin, awarding 10 Free Spins.
This mode maintains the same mechanics and functions as the Go Bananas Bonus, only the Progress Ladder begins with Level 1 complete, awarding 1 Sticky Wild Reel to a random position.
Featurespins & Bonus Buy
Players may purchase one of the following Featurespins & Bonus Buy options:
- Bonushunt Featurespins: Each spin is 3 times more likely to trigger a Bonus Game for 2x your bet per spin (96.3%)
- Wild Tree Featurespins: Each spin guarantees at least 2 Wild Reels per spin for 50x your bet (96.29%)
- Go Bananas: Awards 10 Free Spins and a special Progress Ladder for 100x your bet (96.3%)
- Banana Plantation: Awards 10 Free Spins and Level 1 complete on the Progress Ladder for 200x your bet (96.25%)
All of the above options include an Extreme Volatility rating, except Bonushunt Featurespins, which has a High Volatility score.
Banana Farm has a max win potential of 25,000x your bet. If a game session exceeds this, the current mode ends, and the player returns to the base game with the qualifying amount.
Our Honest Verdict
After an invasion of Bananas took over the screen of Hacksaw Gaming’s FRKN Bananas, we’re happy to be in a traditional setting where rotten bananas are not trying to take over the world.
Although Banana Farm is not as rotten as FRKN Bananas or as cheeky as Banana Town, it’s a simple game with Wild Reels, Multipliers, and several Free Spins modes. From a design front, it’s a little half-hearted and slightly dull, but the 25,000x max win potential quickly levels it out.
It has its moments of excitement, particularly when more than 1 Wild Reel appears in the same spin, but getting them to connect to the limited pay lines is another story. For the best outcome, you’d need at least 2 Wild Reels to line up, one after the other, preferably on reels 2 & 3 for a guaranteed connection.
In either Free Spins mode, the Wild Reels feature really comes out of its shell. Similar to the Big Bass Bonanza series, collecting so many Scatters will guarantee a Sticky Wild Reel on a random reel for the remainder of spins, Multiplier included.
When a Sticky Wild Reel is added to the reel, you’re hopeful to receive a sizable Multiplier to go with it, but during testing, the best Multiplier we received was x6. This is not to say that a bigger Multiplier cannot be achieved, especially when Backseat Gaming has listed them capable of up to x100.
All in all, Banana Farm is not the most exciting instalment in Backseat Gaming’s portfolio, but it has its moments of anticipation and great potential.
*The images found in this slot review are currently from Demo Play. On average, our reviews are written prior to the initial release date and before real play is available.
