Keep Em Cool is a cluster pays game delivering wins for clusters of five or more identical symbols on its 5×5 grid.

There are just 7 symbols on the grid, all fruits, but things are made more interesting by their three states – frozen, half frozen or unfrozen. These states do not affect the symbols value but do impact what happens when they form part of a cascade as we shall see.

At the top end, for the biggest clusters, wins can be huge.

Symbols range from lowest to highest as follows: apples, bananas, oranges, cherries, plums, passion fruits, strawberries. At the bottom end, 5 apples in a cluster brings you just 0.1x, but at the top end, a cluster of 21 or more strawberries brings in a win of 5,000x.

There are NO wilds in this game, but watch out for Cocktail Glasses, Blenders and Sunset Picnic scatters, all of which trigger interesting features on the grid.

Like many Cluster Pays games, Keep Em Cool uses cascading wins – so after any win, winning symbols come off the grid and new ones drop in to replace them, potentially bringing up more wins and another cascade.

However … there is a twist.

Only unfrozen symbols are removed after the win in this game – first unfrozen winning symbols, then ALL unfrozen symbols before the spin ends. At the same time, frozen symbols become half frozen, and half frozen symbols become unfrozen. This adds another layer to the standard cascade mechanic but it can feel a bit confusing at times.

Look out for the Cocktail Glass – this will turn winning symbols back to the frozen state before the cascades start, so you can earn another win from them. This can happen multiple times – each Cocktail Glass displays a number that shows how many freezes it can activate before it drops off the grid.

Our favourite part is the Blender symbol – this one absorbs every instance of one particular symbol type from the grid, causing a cascade as new symbols drop in to replace those ones. New symbols may be absorbed too. Once the sequence is completed, then a payout is triggered equivalent to a cluster size of the number of symbols absorbed by the Blender!

Finally, there is also the chance to trigger between 9 and 15 free spins by landing Picnic Basket Free Spins scatters. These are collected in a meter on the right of the grid. Each one displays a number between 3 and 5. The number of spins equals the total of the numbers on the baskets collected in the meter.

The only difference between free spins and base game play is that the chances of landing Blenders and Cocktail glasses is higher. Also, landing further picnic baskets triggers more spins each time.

Keep Em Cool can feel a bit too much like a lazy day on the beach – plenty of sun and sea, lots of clinking ice cubes in drinks, but in truth, not much going on – lots of ice cracking and waves lapping, but little pay off.

Whilst the freezing symbols is an interesting feature – keep your eye on this as you will want to unfreeze as many symbols as possible to create bigger cascades – it can make the gameplay a little confusing at times. The best part in testing was the blender symbol. We got one nice payout in the free spins round in testing when it absorbed enough bananas to trigger a 75x payout. However, the caveat is that it rarely showed. In fact, during over 100 spins it didn’t appear once for us in the base game.

Overall, Keep Em Cool looks nice and has some interesting twists to it, but it left us feeling a little underwhelmed.