Five Star

Five Star Slot Review

Most fruit machines are nostalgic furniture: you play them for the look and forgive the pays. Five Star argues the opposite case. Behind the gold-arched title, the oversized star and the chrome-bezelled reel windows of a seaside cabinet, Red Tiger have built a game where the payout structure, not the dressing, is the whole point – and where one symbol can pay more than the entire fruit paytable combined.

What that restraint leaves is a 5×3 grid with just three paylines, a 96.2% RTP, and wins capped at 2,000x your stake – a far leaner proposition than the studio’s busier machines like Mystery Reels Megaways or Reel King Mega. Three lines is a commitment most modern studios won’t make. Almost everything has been taken out, and what’s left has to justify itself.

How Five Star Pays

Wins pay from left to right on adjacent reels, starting from the leftmost reel, across three fixed paylines. That’s the whole structure. There’s no cluster mechanic, no ways-to-win expansion, no second screen. A symbol has to line up on one of the three lines from reel one, or it counts for nothing.

Three lines on a five-by-three grid means most of what you see doesn’t matter. Symbols can stack up on reels four and five all afternoon and pay nothing at all, because the win has to begin on the leftmost reel and run unbroken across adjacent ones. On a board this size, that’s a demanding shape to hit, and it’s the reason the middle line does so much of the work.

Stakes run from 0.10 to 50 per spin. With a hit frequency of 10.78%, winning spins arrive at roughly one in nine, which means this is a game that spends long stretches showing fruit and nothing else. The autoplay option runs at your currently selected bet if you’d rather not press spin every time, and keyboard players can start a round with the spacebar.

Setting a bet is a single button press: the BET control steps through the available stake levels, and the SPIN button starts the round at whatever’s selected. There are no coin values to juggle and no side bets to switch on. Everything the game asks of you happens before the reels move.

The paytable is classic fruit-machine stock, and the values below are what each combination pays:

• 7 – 20x, 60x, 180x for three, four, five
• Watermelon – 10x, 30x, 90x
• Grapes – 6x, 18x, 64x
• Plum – 4x, 12x, 36x
• Orange – 3x, 9x, 27x
• Lemon – 2x, 6x, 18x
• Cherries – 1x, 3x, 9x

The seven sits alone at the top of that ladder, with a real premium over the watermelon beneath it, and the gap only widens as you go down. Below the grapes, the fruit falls away quickly. The bottom half of the paytable is pocket change – prizes that exist to keep the coin counter ticking between the wins that actually matter.

There’s no wild and no scatter. Nothing substitutes for anything, and no symbol carries a bonus trigger. The only symbol that breaks the routine is the Five Star symbol itself, which works as an instant win rather than a substitution.

Repeat Spin

The Repeat Spin is the feature the whole game hangs on. Every win, whatever its size, carries a chance of a repeat spin – and a repeat spin repeats the win. Line up three oranges, and if the Repeat Spin fires, the payout lands again.

There’s no skill to it and no decision to make. The reels simply respin into another copy of the prize, and in principle it can keep going, one repeat stacked on the last. It’s a mechanic that makes even the smallest line win worth watching to the end.

The sequence runs like this. The reels stop and a winning combination lands on one of the three lines. The win is paid, and then the game either settles or fires the Repeat Spin banner – and when it fires, the same combination lands again and the same prize is added a second time. Nothing about the repeat is guaranteed, and nothing about it can be forced. It’s a coin toss stacked on top of every payout the game makes.

Because every win is eligible, the feature scales all the way down. A single cherry line can repeat. So can a full line of sevens, and that’s where the repeat math gets interesting: the fruit paytable on its own can’t approach the 2,000x ceiling, but the same prize paid several times over can. The cap is generous for a game shaped like this, and the Repeat Spin is the only road that leads anywhere near it.

The Five Star Symbol

The game’s own name lands on the reels as a special symbol. Five Star symbol combinations pay an instant win rather than a standard line prize, and those prizes are worth considerably more than anything the fruit can manage:

• Five Star combination – 30x instant win
• Five Star combination – 100x instant win
• Five Star combination – 500x instant win

On top of the instant prize, these combinations also carry the chance of a Repeat Spin, so a 500x hit can double on the spot. That’s the route to the serious money in a game whose regular paytable tops out well below it.

Nothing else in Five Star comes close to those figures. The instant win ladder is the only part of the paytable that behaves like a modern slot, and the Five Star symbol is the only thing on the reels that can produce it. When one lands, it’s the whole reason to be watching.

Our Honest Verdict

Overall Rating: 7/10

Playing Five Star is mostly waiting, punctuated by moments that matter more than they should. You spin three lines of fruit, one spin in nine pays anything at all, and the Repeat Spin decides whether that win is forgettable or the best thing that happens to you all session. That second roll of the dice on every single prize is the one reason to choose this over any other fruit machine in the arcade.

The instant win ladder is the best thing in it. A 500x Five Star combination, repeatable on the spot, gives this little cabinet a punch its fruit paytable could never deliver on its own. The weakness is harder to forgive: three paylines and a 10.78% hit rate mean the glossy reels can go quiet for long stretches, and nothing in the game fills that silence.

This is one for the purists – players who’d rather master a single clean mechanic than browse a menu of bonus rounds, and who don’t mind a game that makes you wait for it. Anyone who wants free spins, pick-me rounds or expanding reels will find none of that here. But for what it sets out to be, the old seaside shape polished bright, it’s a lovely little machine.

Five Star FAQs

• What is the RTP of Five Star?

  Five Star runs at an RTP of 96.2%.
• How does the Repeat Spin feature work?

  Every win in Five Star has a chance of triggering a Repeat Spin, which repeats that win. There’s no trigger you can influence – it fires at random after any winning spin, and in principle it can fire repeatedly.
• What does the Five Star symbol do?

  Five Star symbol combinations pay an instant win of 30x, 100x or 500x, and they also carry the chance of a Repeat Spin on top of the prize.
• How often does Five Star hit a winning spin?

  Five Star has a hit frequency of 10.78%, which works out to roughly one winning spin in nine.
• How many paylines does Five Star have?

  Five Star has three paylines. All symbols pay from left to right on adjacent reels, starting from the leftmost reel.
• Does Five Star have a wild or scatter symbol?

  No. Five Star has no wild and no scatter – the only special symbol is the Five Star symbol itself, which pays an instant win rather than substituting for other symbols.
• What is the maximum win on Five Star?

  The maximum win on Five Star is 2,000x your stake.
• When was Five Star released?

  Five Star’s release date is 5 October 2016.