Fruit Storm

Fruit Storm: Slot Overview

Pop open an umbrella all you slot enthusiasts out there; here's a weather-based game from the apparently meteorologically minded team at Stakelogic. If one segment of the population pays particular attention to the weather, it's the agriculture industry, and Fruit Storm's action is located on a farm full of produce and livestock. Like tornado laden slots of the past (Victoria Wild springs to mind), twisters in Fruit Storm are a good thing because they plaster wilds to the grid when they blow through and can trigger free spins. As well as these extras are tumbles, multiplier symbols as high as x100, and a serene sounding cloud feature.

Fruit Storm captures the weather's multifaceted nature by splitting the screen into 'good' and 'bad' weather. On the right, we find a pleasantly pastoral scene of a big red barn sitting peacefully beneath relatively calm skies and before rows of crops. On the left side, chaos has been let loose by a twister, picking up livestock like Dorothy's house in The Wizard of Oz. This would be a horrific experience in real life, yet it's one you want to see on the reels, as tornado symbols bring with them a bunch of benefits. The theme itself is not a new one in the world of slots, drawing heavy inspiration from classics such as NetEnt's Tornado Farm Escape.

It'll probably be no surprise to know Fruit Storm is a highly volatile slot, given the capriciousness of the weather. This is partly due to the potency of multiplier symbols found in the bonus round, but if you pay extra, they also appear in the base game. How this works is that regular bets range from 20 p/c to $/€20 per spin in the default mode when there are no multipliers in the main game. To get them, you activate Super Stake, which increases the stake by 25%. No matter how you choose to play Storm Fruit, the RTP remains the same at 95.85% - whether buying free spins or activating Super Stake.

Each spin unloads 64 symbols onto an 8x8 game grid, with the goal of creating clusters of five matching symbols or more. Seven pay symbols appear on the board - lemons, oranges, plums, grapes, apples, watermelons, and strawberries. A five-symbol cluster of them is worth 0.2x to 1x the bet, rising to 20-150x for a 15+ sized cluster. Lastly, are wild symbols, which substitute for any regular paying symbol.

Fruit Storm: Slot Features

The extensive list of Fruit Storm's features includes tornado symbols, multiplier symbols, free spins with walking wilds, a cloud feature, a gamble option, and a bonus buy.

Tornado Symbols

These are scatter symbols which activate certain features, depending on how many of them hit:

• Landing 1 tornado symbol adds 1-4 wild symbols in random positions and leaves a wild in its own position.
• When 2 tornadoes are in view, 2-6 wild symbols are added in random positions while leaving wilds in their original positions.
• Finally, having 3 tornadoes in view awards 3-8 wild symbols plus wilds in the original positions, plus, 10 free spins are awarded following any win evaluation.

Multiplier Symbols

These purple jar tiles land bearing multipliers of x2 to x100. They only land during free spins or in the base game when the Super Stake is activated. If more than one multiplier symbol is in view, the values are added together before being applied. One important rule is that multiplier symbols do not have to be adjacent to winning clusters to be used.

Free Spins

As well as multiplier symbols entering the game, tornados may add 2-3 wild symbols to the board before regular symbols tumble in at the start of each free spin. During this bonus round, when a wild is part of a win, it moves to a random empty adjacent position before a new cascade occurs.

Cloud Feature

This extra may appear at random on any losing spin. When it does, the symbols in view rearrange themselves in a way to create a win.

Optional Gamble

After hitting a winning cluster, players have the option of gambling their prize money. Picking the correct colour of a face-down card doubles the win; guessing the correct suit quads it. Naturally, picking the wrong outcome loses the money.

Buy Feature

Players who are able to buy free spins get four options to choose from. Paying 50x, 100x, or 200x the total bet gets you 10, 15, or 20 free spins, respectively. Or you can pay 125x to have one of the previous three options randomly awarded.

Fruit Storm: Slot Verdict

A real game of two halves this one. The base game plod is exacerbated by its 30s saloon era soundtrack, not doing much a lot of the time. Occasionally a twister hits the board to drop a few wilds around the place, but they didn't tend to be game-changing wilds of the sort you might come across in a Hacksaw slot, for example. A handful of wilds are simply added to the grid, and if you're lucky, they'll help improve or create a winning cluster. There's nothing particularly cunning about them, and the whole vibe is noticeably chill, which lead to a bit of laidback straw chewing until free spins eventually blew in.

Compared to the base game, free spins are like night and day, more so if Super Stake is switched off. For one, wilds become more interesting due to their ability to walk after any win they might be a part of. Walking wilds' lack of growing multiplier might irk Jammin' Jars fanbois and girls, though maybe not too much, since there are multiplier symbols, and their values can drastically improve a winning spin. The best part is that multipliers can be used no matter where they land, Sweet Bonanza style, rather than like a wild multiplier which has to be adjacent to the cluster. Add up a few of the larger multiplier values, and they can do some serious damage. So much so that Fruit Storm enforces a win cap of 25,000x, lest the tornado reaches F5 on the Fujita scale.

No doubt, Fruit Storm has everything it needs to produce crazy moments. Where the game dips is that the features are either pretty straightforward, bordering on simplistic, or have been used extensively elsewhere. Fruit Storm does a decent job of pulling what it does have together to occasionally get heart rates pumping, yet there's a feeling that if the spark of originality was brighter, Fruit Storm might have been closer to an unmissable slot than just a well-made one.