Fruit Zen Slot – Free Demo
Provider:
Betsoft
Four Free Respin triggers came out of 360 spins on this Betsoft fruit machine, and between them they carried 37% of everything the session won. The Fruit Zen wild only reaches reels 2, 3 and 4, it expands to fill whichever of them it lands on, and every respin in the game starts from that one…
Play Fruit Zen demo
Ten paylines, paying from both ends
Fruit Zen is one of the fruit slots issued by Betsoft. It was launched back in February 2015, and this one is looking a bit more intriguing than the name implies. I played 360 spins at a stake of 1.50, and the balance moved from 1,000.00 to 1,004.05.
Fruit Zen has a serene oriental sort of theme. Those 360 spins cost 540.00 and returned 544.05, a session return of 100.8%. It has a soothing soundtrack and an all around calm vibe to it, and it's a basic slot, having an arrangement of 5 reels and 10 paylines that pay both ways. On any one line only the highest left paying win and the highest right paying win are counted.
The wild lives on reels 2, 3 and 4
The standard symbols are fruit. Every payout is multiplied by the line bet rather than the total bet. The most lucrative of these is the Orange, returning 25 times the stake for a complete line of five, and these symbols alone are clearly not that engaging. That's where the Fruit Zen symbol comes to use. My largest single spin outside the respins was 72.00 on spin 19, 48 times the stake.
The Fruit Zen symbol is the wild and substitutes for any symbol, and it only appears on reels 2, 3 and 4. One of my frames caught it stacked over reel 4 for a 3.60 win at the 1.50 stake. When it lands it expands to fill its entire reel, and coinciding wins on different paylines are combined. Spin 275 paid 37.50 with no respins involved, 25 times the stake.
Four respin triggers in 360 spins
Landing an expanding Fruit Zen wild will award a Free Respin. It happened four times across my 360 spins, on spins 27, 64, 107 and 196. Any extra reel landing the Fruit Zen symbol awards further respins. None of my four triggers picked up a retrigger.
Our Minty Verdict: Four triggers carried 37% of everything my 360 spins won, and stripped of them the session would have finished a long way short of the 540.00 it staked. Betsoft spread the same fruit over 243 ways in Fruitbat Crazy and squeezed it onto three reels in Jumbo Joker, so the single expanding wild here is the narrowest route into a feature of the three.
What the respins were actually worth
Basic games like this may not appeal to everyone, especially those who like hectic games. The gaps between my triggers ran 37 spins, then 43, then 89. And yes, this game would be a sedative if not for the respins. My balance peaked at 1,164.70 on spin 114, and its lowest point over the session was 981.55.
The main game gets a bit repetitive after a while. The respins are far from impossible to trigger — I got four of them in 360 spins, and they paid 37% of everything I won. On spin 64 the base game paid 0.90 and the respins that followed added 55.50. But they are finished before you can blink, with the largest of the four paying 65 times the stake. That one landed on spin 107 and left the balance at 1,159.00.
Speaking of the wilds, watching the reels there appears to be a whole lot of Fruit Zen symbols drifting by. The smallest of the four respin wins was 14 times the stake, on spin 196. Yet for some reason they only ever seem to land on the central three reels...argh... A third of my 360 spins paid something, and the longest dry stretch was only 16 spins.