Cheeky Chimp Slot Review

A cartoon safari through the jungle, with a grinning chimp as the symbol that matters. Three of him anywhere on the reels and the game stops behaving like a line slot: the chimps lock where they landed, the reels keep spinning around them, and every locked chimp is sitting on either a coin prize or one of three jackpots. Genii built its catalogue on plain line games, Champions of Olympia included, so a working hold-and-win round from this studio is new ground.

There is a second bonus and it is the duller one. A tiger scatter hands out 15, 20 or 25 free spins for three, four or five of it, with nothing added on top. The two never meet, either, because the chimp is switched off for the whole of the free spins.

Underneath all that sits a 5x3 grid on 15 fixed lines, staking from 0.15 up to 37.50.

The reels hang inside a frame of lashed wooden poles with vines curling round the joints, layered jungle foliage pressing in from both edges and a pale blue sky showing through behind the symbols. Bright, flat, tidy cartoon work, and completely familiar; nothing here was drawn for this game in particular. The animal faces carry it anyway. A snarling spotted leopard, a blue-eyed zebra, a scarlet macaw on a branch, a toucan perched on a tree stump, and down at the low end the explorer kit: brass compass, black binoculars, brown fedora, plus a battered turquoise jeep with luggage strapped under a thatched roof.

The elephant is the Wild, tusks and all, WILD lettered underneath. Strange pick for a game named after a monkey, since the chimp's own face is reserved for the Feature symbol instead. Three jackpot plaques run along a bamboo rail across the top, MINOR in green, MAJOR in purple, MEGA in red, each printed in cash for whatever stake is loaded.

Most of a session here is flat. A hit lands somewhere around one spin in four and the majority come in under the stake, so the balance drains in a slow, unremarkable line while you wait on one of two scatters. That split is the interesting part of the rhythm. Most games funnel everything into a single bonus and one held breath; this one gives two separate things to watch for that never overlap. Tigers mean a long stretch of ordinary spins. Chimps mean half a minute of something else.

Half a minute is about right, too. Three respins is a short leash, and with no Extra Spins symbol the round can be finished before the grid gets past four or five chimps, which makes it feel less like the drawn-out hold-and-win rounds it borrows from and more like a quick reveal. You'll probably rate it higher or a lot lower on exactly that point, depending on whether you want a bonus to build tension or just pay you and get out. Medium volatility handles the rest: this rarely goes properly cold, and it rarely spikes either.

The chimp round is the reason to load this. Short, a little thin, and still the best thing Genii has put on a 15-line game, because three bet-scaling jackpots give the feature a top end that a 1,000-coin top symbol can never reach on its own. Everything wrapped around it is ordinary. Free spins are filler, the wild only substitutes, and the jungle art could be lifted into any other safari slot without anyone noticing.

What grates is how little the game will tell you while you play it. No RTP figure, no volatility statement, nothing on hit rate. The numbers doing the rounds put it at 96.01% with medium volatility and a hit somewhere near 23%, which matches how it behaves, but you are taking that on trust rather than reading it off the game.