Lucky Lemons

Lucky Lemons: Slot Overview

Is casino game maker Snowborn Games into Feng Shui? That was a question which arose when reviewing its online slot Lucky Lemons, since according to what some have said about the Chinese geomancy, having 9 lemons in a bowl purifies energies while also being evidence of good luck and fortune. Hopefully, players manage to rummage up those last two things since good luck and fortune are two of the most coveted outcomes in online gambling. Not sure how coveted Lucky Lemons will be, though. It's a pretty vanilla slot, ultra-light on theme, while possessing elements recognizable from earlier Snowborn releases.

Lucky Lemons sits on a different branch of the same family tree as slots like Pile 'Em Up and, by extension, to a lesser degree, Tippy's Tavern. It's a low personality fruity slot, blue backgrounded in the base game, orange in the bonus, and red in free spins. There's not much else to say about the audiovisuals other than they are pleasantly innocuous to the point of being uninteresting. Like calming elevator music.

The bet selection in Lucky Lemons is 20 c to $/€50 per spin, and players are able to buy the free spins round from the feature shop. Operating on a medium volatile math model, of the three available RTP configurations, 96% is the default return value. A 5-reel grid is where the symbols land in 3 rows, forming winning combinations along the 20 paylines.

Awarding up to 1 to 2.4 times the stake are the low pay J-A card ranks, then we've got grapes, plums, watermelon slices, and cherries, worth 7x to 17x the bet for 5 OAK. Wilds pay 100x the bet when a winning line of 5 of them land on the grid. Wilds appear on all reels and can substitute for all regular pay symbols.

Lucky Lemons: Slot Features

Lucky Lemons' features carry on from Snowborn Games' prior slots, where they include money symbol collects, a Lemon Booster multiplier, free spins, a hold 'n win bonus round with jackpot prizes, and a feature buy.

Collect Wins & Lemon Booster

Landing a Collect symbol on the rightmost reel awards the total amount of all Lemon symbols in view, multiplied by the value of the Lemon Booster. Lemon symbol values are 0.2 to 50 times the bet. The Lemon Booster starts at x1. It increases with each 1UP symbol collected up to x10. After the multiplier has been applied to Lemon symbols, it resets to x1 in the base game. The Lemon Booster is available in the base game and in free spins.

Free Spins

Hitting 3 scatters on reels 1, 3 and 5 awards 10 free spins. Each 1UP symbol increases the Lemon Booster multiplier, and in free spins, the Lemon Booster does not reset. Moreover, +5 free spins are awarded when the Lemon Booster multiplier reaches x4, x7, and x10.

Bonus & Prize Symbols

The Bonus is randomly triggered when landing a Lemon symbol on reels 1, 2, 3, or 4. When activated, the feature starts with 3 bonus spins on an empty grid. A Lemon or Prize symbol landing anywhere resets the 3 bonus spins. Lemons are sticky. If Lemons and Prize symbols fill all of the positions, the Mega Prize is awarded. The feature ends when there are no empty positions left, or all of the spins run out.

During the Bonus feature, the four possible Prize symbols are the 30x Mini, the 100x Minor, the 500x Major, and the 5,000x Mega. Prize symbols are collected by their corresponding meters, and are removed from the reels. Symbols that trigger a win remain on the reels until the feature ends. If 3 of the same Prize symbols land, the corresponding prize is awarded.

Buy Free Spins

At Lucky Lemons' feature shop, players can buy 10 free spins for 50 times the total bet.

Lucky Lemons: Slot Verdict

It was hard to know where to begin with Lucky Lemons. The game was so vanilla, so lacking in character it struggled to spark many trains of thought. This led to some internet noodling, along the lines of 'Are lemons lucky?, and a number of beliefs popped up in the search results, including the Feng Shui info. Maybe that's where Snowborn got the idea for Lucky Lemons from, maybe not. Snowborn didn't have to look far for the gameplay ideas since many of them have either shown up in the studio's earlier work or are common features that return in various incarcerations again and again, and again. Same goes for the local jackpots which Games Global studios clutch onto like a drowning man to driftwood. They remain a polarizing feature: some revel in the chase, while others bemoan the allocation of RTP towards seemingly unattainable pots.

Couple the so-so gameplay with the soulless presentation, and Lucky Lemons was a game that was hard to fall for. It wasn't dislikable either, however; it just didn't really elicit any strong emotional response either way. The game does its thing, you collect Lemon symbol cash prizes, increment the Lemon Booster multiplier, maybe trigger a bonus or two, ho-hum, on it goes. The action is okay, but any edge, any angle, any hook, was sorely missing. Snowborn has shown in the past it is more than capable of creating slots with character such as Cat Clans, or those with punch like the two Masters slots, yet Lucky Lemons displayed neither of those qualities.

Lucky Lemons does have a max win of 5,000x, and given it's similar in some ways to one of Snowborn's more successful slots, Pile' Em Up, who knows, it might be a hit with a certain audience. Great if it does, but equally great if we never end up crossing paths with Lucky Lemons again.