Wild Linx Slot by Playtech

The base game is plain fruit-machine stuff, and there's no pretending otherwise. Glossy watermelons, pineapples, oranges and plums pay the high end, gold-outlined spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs fill the low end, and the paylines run straight left to right with nothing tumbling or expanding. What dresses it up is the neon arcade styling: a deep blue dotted backdrop glowing purple and magenta, a reel window rimmed in hot-pink neon, and a rainbow light-bulb "Wild Linx" marquee sitting between four jackpot meters across the top.

The Wild Linx pick round is the reason to bother with any of it. Two kinds of glowing "X" wild land only on reels 2 through 5, a pink one and a gold one, while blue arrows printed with cash values (5.00, 2.50 and so on) land only on reels 1 and 2. Get all five reels to show an arrow, a wild or a gold wild at once and the feature fires. You then pick each wild in turn. Every pink wild pays the combined total of all the arrow values on the board, multiplied by 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x or 8x. Every gold wild skips the arrows and hands over a fixed jackpot instead, Mini at 20x, Minor at 100x, Major at 500x or the Grand at 2,000x the total bet. And a pink wild can flip to gold the instant you pick it, turning a cash prize into a jackpot shot. Whatever you uncover is tallied and paid once every wild has been opened.

Three or more scatters open the free games, and you choose the shape they take. Stacks gives 8 spins on reels stripped back to the four fruits and the scatter alone, clean stacked-fruit line wins with 3+ scatters retriggering another 8. The X option gives 5 spins with a boosted chance of setting off the Wild Linx round, retriggering 5 at a time. So one mode is a quiet fruit grind, the other is really just trying to force the pick feature to show up. There's no buy button, so the scatters are your only way in either way.