Hot Fruits Wheel Slot – Free Demo

A fruit slot with a wheel bolted to the side

Hot Fruits Wheel is the result of Amatic doing what Amatic does. The base game is a line slot and the wheel sits outside it, reached only from the reels. If you identify the game, it's because it's a traditional fruit slot, although the wheel on top of it is the part that's meant to be fresh. The Bonus symbol is the only route to it.

The fruit theme is still there. So they didn't wander too far from the mood of every other fruit slot, and as the name indicates, Hot Fruits Wheel is a fruit game with a wheel fastened on top of it. Fruit Box and Hot Seven are Amatic titles from the same fruit corner.

Hot Fruits Wheel is a 5-reel slot with 20 pay lines, and the game has an arrangement of 5x3 rows. The bonus condition is counted across the whole grid rather than along those lines. The lines are selectable, 10 up to 20 in steps of 10. This means you don't have to play the entire set. It also means the five Bonus symbols that start the feature are counted anywhere on the reels, whatever the line count is set to.

The Wild that cannot reach the wheel

There is, of course, also a Wild symbol that does its customary job. It substitutes for all symbols except the Bonus symbol. So a screen one Bonus symbol short of the five needed cannot be filled in by a Wild. There is as well a bonus triggering symbol that arrives in the form of the Bonus symbol itself, which is also the Scatter and pays in any position. In the Bonusspins that role reverses and the Bonus symbol becomes the one doing the substituting.

What the Bonus Wheel deals out

Landing 5 Bonus symbols anywhere on the reels in the main game sets off the Bonus Wheel, and with the wheel activated you're assured a number of Bonusspins and a multiplier. Both awards are settled before the first Bonusspin is played. Both come off the same spin of the wheel, so for instance, players can possibly draw 15 Bonusspins followed by an x5 multiplier. The smallest draw the wheel holds is 5 Bonusspins at x1.

Collecting the five Bonus letters

The Bonusspins are dealt by the Bonus Wheel. Nothing about the trigger decides which of the awards comes up. It randomly selects 5, 10 or 15 of them and a multiplier of x1, x2, x3 or x5. During the Bonusspins the Bonus symbol substitutes for all symbols and illuminates one letter of the word Bonus each time it lands. All five letters award another spin of the Bonus Wheel. That further award adds 5 Bonusspins to the run.

Minty Slots Verdict: One condition opens this game up and nothing else does, and across 290 spins at a 20-credit stake the five Bonus symbols never stood on the reels together, so the wheel that gives the game its name stayed a diagram on the rules screen.

290 spins without the wheel

What the makers did here was to take an old game and dangle a wheel off it. The wheel sits behind a single condition, five Bonus symbols on screen at once, and there is no other way into it. The old game is the fruit slot, and the wheel dispenses both the number of spins and the multiplier.

Testing the game for this review I never triggered the Bonus Wheel. The longest dry stretch ran 24 spins and ended on spin 240; the spin after it paid 360.00, 18 times the stake and the biggest win of the session. 290 spins at a 20-credit stake and the five Bonus symbols never landed together once, with 5,800 wagered against 1,754 back. Fifty-nine of those spins paid something, and 35 of the 59 returned less than the stake. That was a 30.2% return, and the balance never once rose above the 10,000 it started on. The low point was 5,870.00, and the session closed at 5,954.00 after spin 290 paid 80.00.

With that said, this is a perfectly average game to carry the Amatic logo. The wheel is the only feature in it, and the Bonusspins it deals are the only spins that come free. But does it truly mean anything when the game is a fruit slot with a wheel on it?