Welcome to another cheerful and friendly title from Play'n GO. Banana Rush greets you with a huge gorilla leaning over the wooden reel frame as he watches every spin. The base game is calm, but bananas, baskets and sudden feature triggers stop it ever feeling flat. If you like online slots that keep things light, colourful and slightly mischievous rather than serious, this one fits that mood very well.
The action takes place in a sunny jungle. Large leaves frame the reels and the area itself looks like a handmade board. Symbols are easy to read and nicely animated. There is a monkey that plots with folded arms, a hippo that daydreams, a crocodile that smirks and a parrot that looks permanently surprised. Even the card royals are chunky and clear, which helps when wins are counted. The game does a good job of using animation to show what matters. Banana baskets glow when they land, and in the Reward Spins feature the modifiers show up as chunky tokens at the top of the screen. When the wheel feature starts, the background dims and the wooden wheel spins in the centre, with banana and arrow icons, and x2, x4 and x10 sections clearly marked. The whole presentation feels more like a cheerful cartoon than a serious jungle expedition.
Here is a quick look at the symbol multipliers. Values are shown as win multipliers based on the total bet.
Symbol | x3 | x4 | x5 |
Wild | x5 | x10 | x40 |
Monkey | x3 | x7.5 | x25 |
Hippo | x3 | x7.5 | x25 |
Crocodile | x2 | x5 | x10 |
Parrot | x2 | x5 | x10 |
A | x1.5 | x2.5 | x5 |
K | x1.5 | x2.5 | x5 |
Q | x1 | x1.5 | x3 |
J | x1 | x1.5 | x3 |
10 | x1 | x1.5 | x3 |
Wilds can step in for all regular symbols except Scatters and can also form their own winning lines.
Three or more gorilla Scatter symbols launch the Reward Spins round. You begin with a set number of spins and a simple instruction on the screen: collect Banana Baskets to advance. Each basket that lands fills a meter at the top of the reels. Hitting certain points on that meter can add extra spins or improve the active modifier.
Before the first Reward Spin plays, a wooden wheel appears. You spin it to receive a starting modifier, and as you move along the basket meter, you may spin again to upgrade it. The wheel can land on banana icons, multiplier icons or basket icons, each tied to a specific upgrade path.
When the wheel lands on coins, you pick up the Multiplier Modifier. This increases the total value of every win during Reward Spins. Upgrades can lift this even further.
If the wheel settles on the banana icon, the feature focuses on improving banana symbols. Lower value bananas can be swapped out for higher ones, which matters later when bananas are counted together.
Landing the basket icon gives you the Banana Basket Modifier. This raises the chance of Banana Baskets landing on the reels during Reward Spins. An upgraded version increases that chance again. Only the improved version is active, so the effect is clean.
Bananas do more than just appear in Reward Spins. As the gorilla collects them in the base game, he can trigger a Hold & Win style feature with re-spins. When this happens, regular symbols disappear and only bananas remain on the reels. You get a small number of re-spins, and each time a new banana lands it sticks and resets the counter.
At the end of the feature, all banana values on the screen are added together. Filling the whole grid not only totals the bananas but also awards a prize of up to 1000 times the initial bet.
Banana Rush uses a 5x3 layout with 10 fixed paylines. Wins pay from left to right on adjacent reels, starting from the leftmost reel, and only the highest win on each line is paid. Scatter symbols ignore the line rules and trigger features wherever they appear. The game states a maximum win potential of up to 3000 times the bet, which comes from the mix of strong symbol lines, modifiers and the banana based features working together.
Banana Rush is easy going, bright and playful, and the systems around bananas and baskets stop it from becoming a dull, spin and wait experience. The gorilla mascot gives the game a bit of character, while meters, modifiers and prize values are all shown on the screen, so you never need to dive into menus to understand what is happening. Players who enjoy colourful, cartoon-styled games with steady feature action and straightforward rules are likely to feel comfortable here.