Winter Berries

Yggdrasil is a company known for producing games that have high-quality graphics, and they also tend to have slots that use a variety of different types of themes with bonus features that make sense. Their Winterberries online slot might have a theme that's a little too far outside of the realm of normal to really catch the attention of many players, and it's based around the idea that there are a number of berries ready to be picked in a harsh, winter situation. This doesn't really sound like the ideal concept to base an online slot around, but they end up getting a couple of fun features in that creates gameplay that's good enough that you might forget about the awkward theme.

Betting and Format

The Winterberries online slot by Yggdrasil (click here for more) uses 25 paylines, five reels and three rows of symbols. All pays go left to right in this game, and all symbols are stacked. This is important for the progression of the gameplay and features, as you'll see below. Betting starts with coins as low as $0.01 apiece, and you can run the coins up to the $2 level to play with an overall betting spread of $0.25 per spin at the minimum and $50 per spin at the maximum.

Multiplier Stacked Columns

One of the first things that experienced online slot (read more) fans will notice right away is that there are multiplier symbols spread across the top of the screen. These is for a game feature that gives you a chance to get some pretty huge wins based on multipliers and the stacked symbols in the game. The way this works is that all of the symbols are stacked in the game, and if you fill up consecutive reels from left to right, then you'll add a multiplier to all of your wins. Filling up two columns (always from left to right) gives a 2x multiplier to all of your wins, three columns gives 3x, and so on. This means that you can get some pretty huge multi-line wins if the columns line up correctly.

Frozen Berry Re-spin Feature

Another feature that adds a tremendous amount of value to the game is the frozen berry re-spin. Whenever you get a winning combination on the reels, they will immediately freeze in place not only the symbols for the winning combination, but also every other matching symbol on the reels. The non-frozen symbols will then spin as well to give you a chance to add more of the same matching symbol. Each time you get more of that same symbol, they will freeze and create another re-spin. Once you have a re-spin where no new symbols are added, your win will be awarded. You'll obviously get bigger wins and more wins than you would have otherwise thanks to this feature.

Payout Levels

You'll find seven different berries on the reels with no wild symbols and no scatter symbols in this game. It's pretty interesting that they chose to build this game around the two features listed above since it has required them to completely abandon the scatter symbol and wild symbol concept that dominates the gameplay of virtually every video slot released over the past decade.

The yellow berry that kind of looks like lemons is the top paying symbol, and you'll get 500x when you line up five of a kind. The three large, blue berries awards 150x for five, and you can pick up 75x for the cluster of four large, red berries. A 50x win is awarded for five of a kind for the cluster of orange berries or the cluster of smaller red berries. The blueberries themselves, which are a dark purple and are funny enough not even truly berries, pay 25x for five. You'll also get 25x for five of the mixed blue and red berries.

In Conclusion

There's no denying that Yggdrasil has completely went outside of the box with their gameplay in this title, and it works out really well. However, they've also went outside of the box perhaps a bit too far with the theme, especially since there's nothing exciting to really hook the player at all. This theme doesn't really match up with the gameplay, and that's a shame because the gameplay is excellent. Overall, players that value gameplay over the quirky and awkward theme will love this game, and others will want to pass.