Banana Town Slot Review

We have a history of looking at Relax Gaming’s products. The last of their titles we reviewed was the Great Pigsby Megapays slot, a charming spinner that wow-ed us with its two cute main characters and decent jackpot prize. In the summer of 2022, this Malta-based company has been fairly busy, unleashing two games per month, a release improvement pace for this provider. Banana Town is one of the newest slots from Relax to appear online, debuting on July 7th, 2022. It instantly entered the one hundred rankings in most markets, and after a week there, it started to drop off, exiting the top three hundred standings in most developed gaming regions. Still, given its retro theme and our propensity for enjoying Relax slots, we thought we give it a spin and tell you our impressions.

Theme & Design

Naturally, when the word ape and arcade games get used in the same sentence, most gamers inevitably think of Donkey Kong, Nintendo’s famous video game franchise created by legendary arcade product designer Shigeru Miyamoto. Hence, it should come as no surprise that the title character of Banana Town looks a bit like the original Donkey Kong, except he’s wearing a 1920s mob-like outfit. We have to say that Relax really went all-in with the 8-bit video game motif here. The pixelated visuals, the music used, and sound effects of Banana Town could have easily come out of a late 1980s arcade machine. In fact, Relax could probably utilize many of the elements implemented in this slot to make a fun-play app that retro gamers would love. The base gameplay here takes place in front of a mansion, where the ape boss sits on a balcony smoking a cigar while his two henchmen guard the entrance to this beach-side structure. Once you are lucky enough to enter the Free Spins round, this trio enters the building, and new music plays. All the game buttons in Banana Town are found on the right side of your screen, while all the info/bet/balance info gets presented on the bottom. What we did not love about this title’s presentation was that we had to go into the settings panel to mute the music and effects, which got a bit annoying after a while. We would have preferred that we had this option on the game screen.

Specs & Gameplay

Banana Town is one of Relax’s high variance releases. It has an RTP of 96.12% and a max exposure setting of x10,000. The bet sizes here range from $0.1 to $50, and the game features the scatter pay system that requires at least eight identical symbols in view to produce a prize. The hit frequency of Banana Town is 18.48%, and its layout features six reels and five rows. The low-paying symbols here are different colored bananas paying x0.5 for eight matching tokens from this group and either x2 or x3 for twelve. The premiums of this game are the five mob monkey characters. These can yield wins of x4 to x12 for twelve-of-a-kind. The two low-level mob members generate prizes of x4 for twelve identical symbols, the two henchmen ones of x6 for the same amount of matching tokens, and the ape boss produces wins of x12 if he appears in view twelve times on the same spin. Please note that Banana Town is a cascading slot, which is another driving feature that boosts its appeal. So, on every spin, winning scatter pay symbols disappear from the grid, leaving space for new ones to drop in their place on the same spin sequence.

Bonus Features

There are two bonus features in Banana Town. The first is a multiplier upgrade mode. As mentioned, and as you likely know, cascades continue happening as long as winning spins occur. When they stop, the sum of all the accumulated wins gets tallied, and the total prize gets paid. Next to the game grid here, there is a symbol stack where every game token has a multiplier attached, starting at x1. Each winning symbol scatter-combo upgrades the corresponding token’s multiplier. The multiplier gets applied to all wins created using this symbol type. The maximum this multiplier can reach is a value of x64. The Scatter of this slot is a dollar sign. Landing three of these on the same reel rotation provides access to the Free Spins bonus round, where eight on-the-house rotations get awarded. Inside this mode, each hit Scatter adds one more free spin. Remember that in the Free Spins round, the multiplier levels earned in the base game get kept active here, with the upgrade feature persistent through the mode. You can purchase your way into this bonus feature for a price of x100 your wager.

GOSU Verdict

We loved Banana Town’s theme and presentation. It reminded us, and likely all prolific reel-spinning enthusiasts out there, of Thunderkick’s 2017 game Flame Busters, Wazdan’s Lucky 9, or Relax’s own Santa’s Stack. The combination of cascading wins and scatter pays is something we fancy about it as well. Moreover, the slightly above RTP of this high variance slot also took us by surprise. That said, it is hard to exit the Free Spins mode here, accumulating a wealth of multipliers and coming close to the game’s max win of x10,000. Still, even though the prize potential of Banana Town is somewhat modest by Relax’s standards, this is a game that you should not miss. It is fun to look at and enjoyable to play. While it may not set the interactive gaming world on fire, we liked it and are confident you will too.

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