Jumbo Safari: Slot Overview
With the insane proliferation of Big Bass Bonanza releases, it can be easy to forget that Pragmatic Play‘s partner, Reel Kingdom, also makes slots which don’t involve reeling fish out of water. When the team takes a break from bass, the results have been mixed, as the studio has a particular style that is, at times, an acquired taste. The same goes for today’s slot, Jumbo Safari, which, while it might not have fish, contains no less than eight different types of animals linked to increasing prize values during its free spins round in a game which puts special emphasis on hitting five-of-a-kind winning combinations.
Jumbo Safari inhabits the sort of jungle where all of the animals have thrown aside animosities or desires to eat each other and are instead the best of buddies. It’s got an Ice Age, Madagascar, Jungle Book vibe going on with a herd of smiling, happy animals stampeding across its reels. The graphics are okay, quite decent for Reel Kingdom, and its energetic backing track is about as zippy as it gets. Everything on screen makes a certain logical sense that may or may not disappoint players who appreciate Reel Kingdom’s odd, non-BB slots, such as Star Pirates Code. The game does look a few years late to the party, though, which is not unusual for Reel Kingdom, but really, so far, not too bad at this point.
Jumbo Safari’s action is held on a 5×3 action area possessing 20 paylines to land winning combinations of 3+ OAK across. The game is not a high potential one, but it does have a highly volatile math model spitting out an RTP of 96.52% whether betting 5 c to $/€60 per spin, buying the bonus round, or using the ante bet. When activated, the ante bet doubles the stake to increase the chance of triggering free spins since there will be more scatters on the reels.
There are twelve regular pay symbols on the pay table, including J-A card ranks, frogs, parrots, snakes, sloths, crocodiles, elephants, tigers, and gorillas. Winning combinations of 5-matching symbols pay 4x the bet when made up of card royals or 10x to 500x the bet when formed of the higher value animal symbols. Wilds hit on all reels, too. They substitute for anything except the scatter and have the same value as the gorilla when making wild-only winning lines.
Jumbo Safari: Slot Features
With no features in the base game to be aware of, hitting 3, 4, or 5 scatters awards 15, 30, or 50 free spins, respectively. Before free spins start, players pick one on-screen chest to reveal a random pay symbol to be stacked on the reels during the round.
During the feature above the reels, each animal is linked to a monetary prize. The starting values of these prizes are 20x for the frog, parrot, snake, and sloth, 30x for the crocodile, 40x for the elephant, 100x for the tiger, and 1,000x for the gorilla. On each spin, if there is no 5 OAK win, the values of the prizes increase. If a 5 OAK animal symbol winning combination lands, the corresponding animal symbol prize value is awarded, and all prizes reset to their starting value. If no 5 OAK win hits during the round, then at the end of the last spin, one of the money prizes is randomly awarded. Free spins cannot be retriggered.
Feature Buy
Buying the bonus for 100x the bet guarantees 3, 4, or 5 scatters land on a spin to trigger the free spins feature.
Jumbo Safari: Slot Verdict
Jumbo Safari is a charming wee slot with charming wee features. There is not a lot going on here, however, in just about all respects. Jumbo Safari is hardly overflowing with features, and one obvious deficit is a lack of extras in the base game. Literally, no features appear in that phase of play, making it very one-dimensional. On the positive side, 5 OAK winning combinations are chunky, well, the gorilla or wild symbols are, and there weren’t lengthy wait times between triggering the free spins round, even without using the ante bet. Still, no-feature base games in any slot are often in danger of getting repetitive pretty fast.
Moving on to the free spins feature, okay, it was slightly better. Again, the focus is on hitting 5-of-a-kind winning lines to trigger the associated prizes displayed above the reels. These prizes can grow on spins that don’t land 5 OAK wins, but most of the values are not enormous. In addition, for a slot anchoring its thrills around landing 5-matching symbol wins, doing so could be rare occurrences, and free spins rounds failing to land any of them were fairly common. This is despite a stacked symbol being awarded at the beginning of the feature. When this occurs, players are randomly awarded an animal prize as a consolation, which is something, and a 1,000x+ gorilla symbol was awarded once during the review. But free spins could be disappointingly anticlimactic, like going on an actual safari and not seeing any of the Big Five game animals.
As you might have suspected by now, Jumbo Safari is not a slot with huge winning potential, and it is capped at 3,000x the bet. Factor that amount in alongside the limited features and a general lack of major excitement, and while Jumbo Safari has the cute animal safari side locked down, it’s hard to imagine the game producing much jumbo-sized entertainment.
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