Fishin’ Frenzy

Fishin’ Frenzy Slot Review

Fishin’ Frenzy is the rare slot where removing everything was the right call. Its sea sits half in sunlight and half below the waterline, a cartoon fish leaping through the title, and behind that cheerful front-end Blueprint Gaming shipped a game with one feature and no safety nets – no modifier stack, no bonus buy, nothing to soften a bad run. Fifteen-odd years of imitators haven’t made the original any worse.

It runs on a 5×3 grid with 10 win lines, at 96.12% RTP, and the most a single game can pay is £250,000, or 250,000x the total bet. The whole appeal sits in scatter-triggered free games where a fisherman collects the fish on screen. Later titles like Fishin’ Frenzy The Big Catch and Fishin’ Frenzy Reely Big Catch dressed the formula up. The original still does the basic job.

Base Game & Features

The reels sit over that split view of sea and sky, with small overlay slots carrying fish symbols on some reels, which gives the grid a slightly irregular look. Craggy blue-grey boulders crowd in from the sides like a submerged reef wall, and the water fades from sun-flecked chop into deeper blue towards the seabed. Wins pay across 10 fixed lines, and all wins are multiples of the line bet.

The 10 lines are numbered along both sides of the reels, in an order that doesn’t run top to bottom – 4, 2, 8, 6, 10, 1, 7, 9, 3, 5 – which is standard for a game of this era and tells you the lines criss-cross rather than stack in rows. What matters practically is simpler: a spin either lines symbols up on one of those lines or it doesn’t, and the next spin starts.

There’s no cascading, no respins and no random base-game modifier. That’s the whole of the base game, and for a lot of players it’s exactly what they sat down for.

The paytable is short and steep. Here’s what each symbol pays, as a multiple of the line bet:

• Pelican, 5 of a kind – 2,000x
• Pelican, 4 – 200x
• Pelican, 3 – 50x
• Pelican, 2 – 5x
• Tackle Box, 5 – 1,000x
• Tackle Box, 4 – 150x
• Tackle Box, 3 – 30x
• Life Ring, 5 – 500x
• Life Ring, 4 – 100x
• Life Ring, 3 – 20x
• Fish (blue), 5 – 200x
• Fish (blue), 4 – 50x
• Fish (blue), 3 – 10x
• A / K / Q / J / 10, 5 – 100x
• A / K / Q / J / 10, 4 – 25x
• A / K / Q / J / 10, 3 – 5x

Two symbols are doing most of the work in that table. The pelican is the only symbol that pays for two of a kind, and it pays forty times more for five than the royals do. Everything below the life ring is filler.

The steepness is worth pausing on. From three to five of a kind, the pelican jumps from 50x to 2,000x, a forty-fold step, and the tackle box goes 30x to 1,000x. Mid-table symbols don’t scale anywhere near as hard, so the shape of a session is decided almost entirely by whether the top three symbols ever line up.

The scatter is a ship and lighthouse icon, and it doesn’t pay cash of its own. Its only job is to count towards the free games trigger, from three of a kind upward.

The Fisherman doesn’t appear in the base game at all. He turns up only inside the feature, where he’s a wild substituting for every symbol and the richest payer on the sheet at 5,000x the line bet for five of a kind. His pays, which sit on the wild row of the paytable rather than with the ordinary symbols, are:

• Fisherman, 5 of a kind – 5,000x
• Fisherman, 4 – 500x
• Fisherman, 3 – 100x
• Fisherman, 2 – 10x

Fishin’ Frenzy Bonus Features & Free Spins

The free games are the only feature, and the trigger is a flat scatter count:

• 3 scatters – 10 free games
• 4 scatters – 15 free games
• 5 scatters – 20 free games

Inside the free games, the fish symbols stop being ordinary paytable entries and become carries. Each fish on screen carries a prize value, and the fish don’t need to line up on a win line to pay it out. The values run:

• Fish prize values – 20, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250 and 500

The collection works in one step. Every Fisherman symbol on screen collects the prize values from all the fish on screen, so what a spin pays depends entirely on how the two symbol types fall together.

One fisherman over a stocked screen is the round paying at its best. Because the fisherman is also the wild, he’s completing line wins at the same time as he’s scooping the catches, and two fishermen in view each collect the full set of fish prizes. That doubling is where the big single-spin totals come from.

A spin inside the feature resolves in the same order every time. Line wins are struck first as normal, then the catches settle on top, so a stocked screen with a fisherman on it can pay twice over from a single set of reels. The fish themselves never pay without him.

The prize ladder steps unevenly, which shapes what a good screen looks like. The jump from 250 to 500 at the top is as large as the entire bottom half of the ladder, so one top-value fish among the catches is worth more than several small ones. A screen crowded with low-value fish and a single fisherman still pays, just modestly.

A round without a fisherman lands as ordinary line wins only, and the fish carry nothing. There’s no multiplier ladder, no progressive element and no choice of modes, so the feature is exactly as deep as its one idea.

Our Honest Verdict

Overall Rating: 7.6/10

This is a game you play for the moment the boat goes out and the fisherman lands on a full screen, and that moment is worth the wait in a way the base game alone never is. Sessions are long stretches of plain spinning broken by one round that either pays properly or doesn’t. Fifteen years on, the simple version of that loop still works.

The strength is the collect: because every fisherman in view takes the full set of fish prizes, the round can swing wildly on a single spin, and that tension survives repeat plays. The weakness is that everything outside the feature is filler – the royals pay scraps, and there’s nothing else happening on the reels between triggers.

It’s a fit for players who want a simple, fast slot they can run on autopilot while waiting on the boat to come in. Anyone who needs something happening on every spin will find it thin. The water’s still calm, and the fish are still biting.

Fishin’ Frenzy FAQs

• How do you trigger the free games in Fishin’ Frenzy?

  Land the ship and lighthouse scatter 3 times or more in a single spin. The more you land, the bigger the round: 5 scatters is worth double the games of 3.
• What does the Fisherman symbol do?

  During the free games the Fisherman is a wild that substitutes for all symbols. He also collects the prize values from every fish symbol on screen, and each Fisherman in view collects the full set. He’s the top-paying symbol too, at 5,000x the line bet for 5 of a kind.
• What are the fish prizes worth in the free games?

  Each fish symbol carries a prize value of 20, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250 or 500, and the Fisherman collects whichever values are on screen when he lands.
• What is the highest paying symbol in Fishin’ Frenzy?

  In the base game it’s the Pelican, paying 2,000x the line bet for 5 of a kind. During the free games, the Fisherman tops it at 5,000x for 5.
• Does the Fisherman appear in the base game?

  No. He only appears during the free games, where he acts as a wild and collects the fish prizes. In the base game the Pelican is the top-paying symbol.
• Can the fish symbols pay during the base game?

  Yes, but only as ordinary paytable symbols – 3, 4 or 5 of the blue fish on a win line pay 10x, 50x or 200x the line bet. The carried prize values only count during the free games, and only when a Fisherman is on screen to collect them.
• What is the RTP of Fishin’ Frenzy?

  The RTP is 96.12%, based on long-term payback and gameplay.
• How many paylines does Fishin’ Frenzy have?

  The game runs 10 win lines, numbered along both sides of the reels.
• What is the maximum win on Fishin’ Frenzy?

  The maximum win from a single game is £250,000, or 250,000x the total bet, with other operator limits possibly applying.