Ice Mints: Slot Overview
Editor’s note: This review is based on an early access version of the game. We may update the review after the full release if necessary.
When it comes to bigging up a slot, some studios write a back story, some provide almost nothing, while Pragmatic Play often whips out a short, sweet, snappy one-liner. So it is with today’s review, which comes with the tagline ‘Discover chills and thrills in Ice Mints.’ It’s not a sentence that gives a lot away, though perhaps Pragmatic Play is purposefully vague in order to tempt curious players into trying the game to fill in the blanks. Whatever the behind-the-scenes situation might really be, Ice Mints is an icy online slot of full reel wilds, multipliers, and more.
If you’re sitting sweltering on a hot summer’s day, Ice Mints’ game world is just the place for a refreshing cool down. It has a simple appearance, but the slabs of ice and sprinkling of mint leaves do look inviting. In some ways, what you see is what you get – Ice Mints is a pretty basic game all around, one that’s easy to imagine Pragmatic Play knocked out quickly and easily in order to have extra time to spend on its more flagship-oriented slots. The pleasantly basic appearance isn’t hard on the eyes, though a lack of personality produces a certain hollowness.
Ice Mints’ math model is a highly volatile one (rated 5 out of 5), and the action is held on a 5×3 play area where there are 20 paylines evaluating winning combinations, left to right, starting from the leftmost reel. Players may stake 20c to $/€240 per spin, where the maximum RTP is 96.5%, and the goal is filling reels with wilds and triggering multipliers from cups located below the main grid.
A cute selection of food items has been used for the pay symbols, including orange slices, kiwifruit slices, blueberries, strawberries, juice boxes, drink cups, cola bottles, and smoothies. Fruit symbols in a 5 OAK win award 2.5x to 5x the bet, while the remaining four higher-paying symbols award 10x to 40x for a 5 OAK winning combination. W coin symbols are wild, substituting for everything except scatters and Mints symbols.
Ice Mints: Slot Features
Ice Mints has cup multipliers on the middle three reels, Mints symbols which trigger them, a free spins round that tinkers with the base game rules, and a bonus buy.
Mints Symbol
A cup sits beneath each of the middle three reels. On every spin, random multipliers appear on random cups. When a Mints symbol hits, it drops into the cup beneath it, and a new symbol appears. Randomly, cups may expand wild symbols across the entire reel above them. When that happens, the multiplier on the cup is used to multiply all wins on the grid. If there is more than one multiplier used, they are combined. Possible multiplier values on reels 2 and 3 range from x2 to x20, while possible values on reel 4 range from x2 to x25.
Free Spins
Hitting 3, 4, and 5 scatters in the main game triggers the bonus round with 10, 15, or 20 free spins, respectively. During the feature, cups start without a multiplier and do not get random multiplier values. Instead, when Mints symbols fall into them and do not trigger wild symbol expansion on the reel above, the cup’s multiplier increases. Furthermore, multipliers on cups persist throughout the round. Hitting 3, 4, or 5 grants a further +10, +15, or +20 free spins, respectively.
Feature Buy
The bonus round with its persistent cup multipliers can be bought for 80x the current bet.
Ice Mints: Slot Verdict
Ice Mints is a cute game, but like rolling an actual breath mint around in your mouth, its entertainment value didn’t last long. From the moment Ice Mints loaded, there was something half-baked about it, as if Pragmatic Play didn’t have the drive to make it a really banging slot. Everything looks nice enough, the atmosphere is crisply refreshing, but just as the game world lacks depth, so do the features, making it hard to stick around long-term once each of the individual gaming elements has had a chance to show what they can do.
To be fair, Ice Mints generated a few decent hits, and it was surprising how modest the multiplier values were when this occurred. It is a little annoying that when Mints fall into a cup and trigger a wild symbol expansion during free spins, no additional multiplier value is added to the triggering cup. But, multipliers are combinable after all, and wild reels can help connect more wins, so good things are able to occur. Sizeable winning potential is on offer, too, as Ice Mints comes with a win cap of 10,000x the bet. Makes you wonder how they pick these win caps, where a game like Ice Mints has a 10Kx limit while a slot like Power of Thor Megaways has half that. Oh well, it’s all part of the mystery of mathematics and slots.
There’s little else that’s mysterious about Ice Mints, a game which cheerfully goes about making the best of the features it’s got. Something light and lacking about Ice Mints meant it was difficult to majorly commit, but the game might make for an agreeable short-term spin in the ice while waiting for Pragmatic Play to produce its more impactful work.
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