Safari Sun

Safari Sun: Slot Overview

High up on many travellers' bucket lists is visiting Africa to take part in one of the many safaris on offer there. For nature lovers, it makes perfect sense - heading to the great outdoors to see big, exotic, wild beasts in their element. No bars, glass, or moats separating fauna from the humans watching them, hopefully from a safe distance. For an even safer distance, why not join us as we venture forth with the Swedish software provider Fantasma Games in the African wildlife-themed slot Safari Sun.

It's nothing controversial to say that there are a lot of these sorts of games available to players now, from the classic progressive jackpot Mega Moolah to Avatar UX's RagingPop, a more contemporary release which sprang to mind. Fantasma Games is no slouch with the pixelated paint brush, and its art department has outdone itself by crafting a pleasant vision of this part of the vast African continent. Safari Sun's location has a Mt Kilimanjaro look to it, where grassy patches of land and water features sit before a mountain rising sharply into the sky. The soundtrack is about as laid back as you could ask for, and with a bit of mental input, it's not hard to imagine lounging about in a high-end safari lodge while giraffes wander past your window, and elephants come to drink at the river.

In the base game, Safari Sun is played on a 5-reel gaming grid, the reels lined up in 3-4-4-4-3 formation. Wins pay left to right, in any row, from the leftmost reel onwards, plus an extra reel is added to the grid when free spins are triggered. With its highly volatile math model, the game generates a return to player value of 96% and takes bets of 20 p/c to $/€50 per spin.

Critters and royals make up Safari Sun's paying symbols. More specifically, that means 10-A card ranks as the low pays, worth 1 times the bet for a 5 OAK winning way, whereas the highs are a toucan, meerkats, a baboon, a rhino, and a lion worth 1.5 to 5 times the bet for a 5 symbol winning way. During free spins, when the sixth reel is in play, 6 OAK wins are worth 1.5x the bet for the royals and 3 to 8 times the stake for the picture symbols. Hopefully, wild symbols aren't high on your must-see list of things for a safari, as Safari Sun does not make use of them at any stage.

Safari Sun: Slot Features

What you will or may see on this trip, though, are an Expanding Symbol feature, a Mystery Sun feature, and free spins with a bonus buy option.

Expanding Symbol Feature

Sometimes symbols may land with a sun-mark on them. If sun-marked symbols take part in a winning combination, they expand to cover all positions on their reel.

Mystery Sun Feature

This feature triggers at random in the base game during a win situation. The sun marks 1 to 3 symbols on reels 2, 3, and 4 that take part in a winning combination. The sun-marked symbols then expand to cover their entire reels. Free spins cannot activate during the Mystery Sun feature. This feature has a theoretical hit frequency of 1 in 145.

Free Spins

Scatter symbols land on reels 2, 3, and 4 in the base game. Hitting 3 scatters awards the free spins bonus round. For free spins, the grid grows to 6 reels wide in a 3-4-4-4-4-3 formation. When entering free spins, players pick 1 of 5 options – the lion with 4 free spins, the rhino with 8 free spins, the baboon with 12 free spins, the meerkat with 16 free spins, or the toucan with 20 free spins. During free spins, the chosen high pay symbol is the only high symbol that will land in the feature. Free spins trigger at a frequency of 1 in 170, theoretically.

Buy Free Spins

To buy the free spins feature, the cost is 50 times the bet. When buying free spins, the RTP is slightly higher at 96.06%.

Safari Sun: Slot Verdict

For big game enthusiasts who happen to enjoy taking a punt, joining this safari potentially provides the opportunity to spot a few interesting sights. For starters, it looks good, though a lot of African wilderness slots do, which is probably why so many games use this particular subject matter, and the music's pleasant, making it fairly easy to immerse yourself in Safari Sun's setting. It's more realistic than a lot of what Fantasma Games turns out, if you cast your minds back to games like Fortune Llama, Magikspell, or Rich Raptors, for example, though Safari Sun retains a certain dreamy quality. Equally important, if not more so, Safari Sun piles on some decent gaming through features that work well in both phases of play.

One thing to attempt clearing up. The Mystery Sun feature mentions marking symbols on the middle three reels only, and while it doesn't specifically state this in the game info, it appears sun symbols never land on the outer two reels. The closest we saw to stacking the first reel in free spins, for example, was landing two premium symbols on it. Even though premiums don't appear able to be fully stacked on the outer reels, the game's max win remains rather sizable at 18,792x. To have a chance of achieving that figure, Safari Sun's expanding symbol feature is an entertaining extra, and having just one premium symbol land in free spins is a great idea, too.

In some ways, Safari Sun's free spins round is a bit like those games that level up via a collection mechanic, upgrading lesser symbols until all that's left is the highest-paying symbol - Pink Elephants, being one such example - except in Safari Sun, you can dive right into the round with the symbol/volatility you prefer. This system provides plenty of room to manoeuvre, from max volatility alongside the lion to more 'cautious' options, players may choose, making Safari Sun an interesting option in the busy African countryside slot genre.