Crystal Hot 40 Halloween Slot by Fazi

The reels sit in a haunted house at midnight, or the slot's idea of one anyway: a red crystalline backdrop with a silhouetted mansion on the left, its windows glowing amber, bats flapping across the top corners, a spider dangling from its web on the right, and a pair of grinning jack-o-lanterns leering up from each bottom corner. Against all that spooky red, the symbols are cut like gemstones. The fruit you'd find on any old machine, watermelon, grapes, lemons, oranges, plums and cherries, rendered as low-poly faceted crystals that catch the light as they drop. It's a Halloween coat of paint over a hot-fruit board, and it knows it.

The wild here is a plain one, and that's the thing to get straight if you've seen the rest of this family. It substitutes for every symbol except the star scatter and tops the regular table at 25x for five on a line, but it doesn't expand, stick or carry a multiplier. The Max version of this game runs an expanding wild on the centre reels; this Halloween cut does not. It just lands and fills in. The gold-framed white star is the scatter, and it pays from any position on the screen against your total bet, with five returning 500x. That win gets added on top of your line wins rather than replacing them. There are no free spins attached to it though, no bonus round, nothing to buy. Five scattered stars is the single biggest hit the symbol table offers.

What's actually chasing a big number is bolted underneath the reels. Three mystery progressives, Gold, Diamond and Platinum, tick away on a meter and drop at a random hidden point with no combination to line up, your odds of hitting one scaling with how much you stake. So betting up shortens the odds on a jackpot rather than improving anything on the reels. And after any win you can run the red-or-black gamble, doubling up until you guess wrong or hit the 50,000 ceiling. Take the jackpots and the gamble away and what's left is a straightforward 40-line fruit slot in a pumpkin costume.