In terms of food, the word 'ripe' means something is ready to harvest and eat. Since Ripe Rewards is a slot, of course, that means we're dealing with… fruit – one of the staples of the online gambling scene. It's easy to picture the office of a casino game-making company, fruit baskets overflowing the building for their employees to snack healthily on. The casino game maker in this instance is Pragmatic Play, and it's made a pretty average-looking game, but one which is rescued by the power of sticky wild multipliers in its free spins round.
Average-looking, but since Ripe Rewards is a Pragmatic Play slot, it doesn't look terrible. The studio has a knack for giving even the stodgiest puddle of mud a touch of gleam. It's more that nothing popped out to grab the eye when Ripe Rewards lit up the monitor. The gaming grid is held in an odd metallic device, a jukebox? Hard to say exactly, while a square pattern wall and floor make up the background artwork. The music's quite nice; it has a Stranger Things quality about it, yet Ripe Rewards didn't impress at first look.
The grid utilises a setup of 5 reels, 5 rows of symbols, and 40 paylines. As Prag slots tend to do, Ripe Rewards functions on a highly volatile math model, and it generates three default RTPs depending on how the game is played. A value of 96.02% is produced when betting 20 c to $/€240 per spin, or 96.07% when using the Ante Bet. Clicking the Ante Bet on increases the stake by 50%, doubling the chance of winning the feature.
Fruits are Ripe Rewards' high pay symbols where you will notice grapes, watermelons, pears, apricots, and pomegranates, worth 3 to 15 times the bet for a 5-matching symbol winning line. Lower down the ladder of values are the 10 to A card ranks, firing off 1.25 to 2 times the bet for hitting a line of 5 of them.
Like eating a ripe mango with your bare hands, Ripe Rewards is all about being sticky. This means sticky wilds in the free spins section, including multipliers and a progressive feature, though wild multipliers are also available in the base game as well.
The wild symbol is present on all reels, and it substitutes for every symbol except the scatter. When the wild hits, it may carry a random multiplier of x2, x3, or x5, which applies to all winning combinations with the wild. If more than one wild multiplier is part of the same win, the multiplier values are added together. Wilds pay up to 15 times the bet for making a 5 wild winning line.
Scatter symbols hit on reels 1, 3, and 5. Hitting 3 scatters awards 7 free spins as well as a payout of 2x the bet. The free spins round has a progressive feature. Each wild that lands remains on the grid until the end of the round. Any scatter symbol that hits gets collected by a meter.
For 100 times the bet, players can buy the free spins bonus round. When buying the bonus round, the RTP is 96.04%.
As alluded to, Ripe Rewards didn't grip the imagination, like the thought that space and time are intimately linked rather than separate phenomena, though it perked up at points during the review. To an extent. Amongst the sea of slots on the market, Ripe Rewards doesn't exactly stand out. It's got sticky wild multipliers, which, fair enough, could produce a thrill when they link together. But it's not the most imaginative move, and there was a thought that maybe Pragmatic Play tacked such an effective feature onto Ripe Rewards because it really has nothing else going for it. Had a less potent feature been brought on board, Ripe Rewards would have been even easier to disregard.
But no, sticky multipliers it is, and okay, they can do entertaining things. They've also been connected to the progressive feature in a smart way so that by the end, they're able to have x5 multipliers attached. Multipliers do add rather than multiply each other when more than 1 is used in a win, which is debuff by comparison. Still, they're able to build up on the grid and are available on every single reel, so who knows what might happen? We do know that with a win cap of 10,000x the bet has been set in place, so thrilling hits are technically possible.
As they are in a lot of games, though, and Ripe Rewards isn't a release which stood out from the bunch. It's got fruit, sticky wild multipliers, a faint feel of The Dog House, and a Pragmatic Play sheen, so no doubt a certain number of punters will stumble their way onto it sooner or later. But there are stronger examples of this style of play to choose from, and Ripe Rewards just didn't have the pizzazz to provoke a repeat performance any time soon.
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