Zoom Slot Machine
Thunderkick have been one of the most exciting new game developers to appear in the online casino world in recent years, their unique, often quirky slots have proved fan favourites, indeed, The Rift slot and the Birds on a Wire slot both fall under my own list of regularly played games.
To compete with the big boys does mean getting involved in the most popular slot game themes at some point and with the new Zoom online slot game it seems Thunderkick have decided to tackle the realm of the classic fruit machine slot and try to give it their own twist.
Whilst they have kept the high RTP and low variance structure of many popular classic slot games in this genre, the new Zoom slot is a 6x4 reel game with a special expanding symbol bonus feature with reel re-spins which is sure to liven up the traditional play of a fruity and sets this game apart from the boring 3 reel games on offer elsewhere.
Theme
A good fruity needs to be simple and clear and Thunderkick have managed that well without sacrificing a modern look for the game. The controls are big and easy to identify, both on mobile and desktop versions of the new slot, whilst the reels and backdrops contain high definition bright colours which are nicely blended together.
The symbols number a total of 9, with all the stock fare of Bells, Cherries, 7’s, Grapes, Melon’s and Lemon’s supplemented in your diet of 5 a day with the Wild Symbol and the biggest symbol on the game, the expanding zoom icon, which serves as a form of scatter.
As this is a fruit machine at heart, you won’t really find anything else to get excited about from an audio or visual point of view, so to stand out from the crowd, this new slot needs to offer some new gameplay mechanics and exciting features, the great news is, that it very much does!
Features
The reel set is divided into 6 zoom areas on the reels, each forming a 2x2 grid, this video slot gets 64 fixed paylines as a result of the unusual setup. Things start to get really exciting when a Zoom symbol appears, as it instantly expands into a massive symbol and triggers a reel re-spin. If your initial Zoom symbols fill the whole 2x2 zoom grid when the reel re-spin triggers, these expand to form a super massive symbol covering (as the name suggests) a huge 4x4 area on the reels!
What is incredibly interesting on this slot is the higher payout potential compared to other slots in this field, the manufacturer lists a hit average of nearly 1 in 3, when you consider that there is a max win available of 1500x your bet, there are some truly massive wins hiding here and the excitement should come thick and fast with the probability of the Zoom expanding symbols coming into play at an average of 1 in 6 spins. If you hit a hot streak on this game it’s likely to be very hot indeed!
Summary
I’m not entirely convinced that Thunderkick should be moving away from the novel slot games they are known for, though I concede that you can’t really be called a proper slot game software developer without a fruity in your catalogue of titles. The game is very entertaining and it manages to avoid the dated visuals of many of the classic fruit machine slots out there. If you are a fruit machine fan, this could be a very welcome change of pace from more traditional titles and possibly provides a bridge into the world of more modern video slots.
