Mighty Munching Melons

Theme and Design

A Simple Fruit Based Design And Pacman-Style Hold and Win Bonus

The design for Mighty Munching Melons is very simplistic. It’s all old skool fruit symbols on a basic 5x3 reel set. The game is set in a glasshouse with crates of melons on the floor (of course). The action moves to night-time when the bonus round kicks in (if you ever trigger it) when a weird Pacman-style munching melon comes into play, and Melon Ghosts. It’s all very deliberately retro I feel. This is slots play for those when you aren’t too bothered about the aesthetics or a complicated theme and storyline. Or a nice tune for that matter – the soundtrack sounds like it was banged out on an old Casio keyboard in 5 minutes.

RTP and Variance

There are 3 RTP settings for Mighty Munching Melons, at 96.05%, 95.04% and 94.03%. It is up to your slot site to choose which setting to run the game on. There isn’t much between these to be fair but it’s always worth finding a casino that offers a game at its optimum RTP. You can check for yourself on the game info screen – with Pragmatic Play slots that means hitting the ‘I’ button at the bottom left under the reels then scrolling through until you see RTP.

In my own experience, the best option for high RTP in slots is MrQ which always runs games at the maximum level.

As far as volatility goes, this game is described by Pragmatic themselves as ‘very high’ variance, so it will be very unpredictable. If that is to be believed then it will be even more volatile than Pompeii Megareels Megaways, also out this month, which was extremely volatile in testing.

Maximum Win

The top payout available in Mighty Munching Melons is 3,000x. That is well under what we normally expect from high variance games, particularly ones described as ‘very high’! It’s unclear why Pragmatic Play chose such a low max payout figure. But if that puts you off, you could try Strawberry Cocktail with a 16,000x max win, out on the 20^th February, or any of the games in our list of Pragmatic’s highest max win slots.

Symbols and Paytable

The game format here is simple with 5 reels, 3 rows and 10 fixed paylines. As usual, you will need to land 3 or more identical symbols across the reels from left to right, starting at the left most reel, to trigger a win.

Low value symbols are the cards, Jack, Queen, King and Ace. These are valued at from 0.2x for 3 Jacks up to 5x for 5 Aces. Where this game does perform well is in the top end of the paytable. The premium symbols are the fruits cherries, grapes, lemons and oranges. These are valued at from 2x for 3 cherries up to a massive 1,000x for 5 oranges.

There are NO wilds, but there is a bonus symbol, represented by the Munching Melon! More on that in the next section.

Features and Gameplay

There are no special features in the base game. Instead, you are looking to unlock a classic Hold and Win feature. This is done by landing 3 Munching Melons on one spin. You can also land 2 and randomly watch a 3^rd appear after the spin has stopped. But there are no guarantees of that.

In the Hold and Win game there are three symbol types that can land on the reels – coins, Melons and Melon Ghosts. And sometimes no symbol at all will land in a space.

Coins Valued Up To 500x

As standard with these features, you start with 3 spins. When a coin lands on a spin, the counter re-sets to 3. Coins always hold on the reels and when you run out of spins the value of all coins is added together and paid out. Also, randomly the counter can increase to 4 at any point in the round. If it does, you always re-set to 4 too.

Money values may be 0.1x, 0.25x, 0.5x, 1x, 2.5x, 5x, 10x, 25x, 50x, 100x, 250x or 500x.

Melon Symbols Eat Up Coins

When the Melon symbol lands, then it starts to move around the reels one space at a time, in any direction. As it does, it collects all coins in its path, adding them to the total win amount. When the Melon reaches the edge of the grid, then it just follows a path around the sides before returning to its original spot.

The first Melon has a 1x multiplier. But subsequent Melons have 2x, 3x, 4x and so on. And these multipliers are applied to the value of each symbol they collect.

Melon Ghosts Super-Size The Melons

If a Melon Ghost lands on the reels then it will move to another random position after each spin. If a Melon passes through a Ghost Melon whilst moving around the reels then it grows in size, to 2x2, then 3x3, allowing them to chomp on more coins as they go. When these bigger Melons finish moving around the grid they return to the position at which they last met a Melon Ghost.

End of Round

When re-spins run out, or all position on the reels are full, then a giant 3x3 Melon appears to chomp up all the coins on the screen.  If its the case that the reels are full, then rather than ending the round, the game simple re-sets to 3 or 4 spins again.