BerryBurst Max

Starburst fans rejoice! Those of us who have long been waiting for NetEnt to produce a sequel to what’s without doubt one of their most popular games don’t have to wait any longer. To make up for lost time, the developers chose to make not one, but two different versions of the title – Berryburst, and Berryburst Max. These titles look exactly the same in terms of visuals, features and gameplay – the only difference is a slight change to RTP and the pays themselves. Today, we’re going to take a look at Berryburst Max, the high volatility version. It offers a 5×3 playing field, forgoing regular paylines in favour of using cluster wins instead. Much like the original Starburst, the title only has one bonus that’s relatively easy to activate and utilize, allowing you to score nice wins with a fast-paced rhythm. However, the very nature of the Max version interferes with that ever so slightly, but we’ll dive a little bit deeper with that in our gameplay analysis, which follows just below.

By now, we know better than to doubt NetEnt’s artists. There’s a reason why they’re the biggest slot maker in the business. It’s meant to clearly evoke Starburst’s aesthetic – bright, colourful and simple, with nothing to really distract you from spinning and drinking in the sight of those gorgeous symbols. The emulation is quite well done, only this time around, it’s less stars and more fruits that are at the forefront. A small detail we quite enjoyed was the fact you could see a row of symbols beneath the reels, slightly obscured by the user interface – it’s far from a big thing, but it does a lot to build immersion.

Now, we come to gameplay and we can’t help but feel that NetEnt fundamentally misunderstood their own product, which we’d honestly find baffling. This is the company that produces amazing slots almost every month, and yet, it makes the core mistake of trying to make a high variance Starburst. The appeal of Starburst is specifically in its low variance. That you saw plenty of special feature wins very often and even if they weren’t that big, they piled up after a while. Berryburst Max takes the gameplay idea, but applies a high volatility mindset to it and it clearly doesn’t work nearly as well as it should.

You can wager between $0.01 up to $2.00 in coins, or $0.10 up to $200 in cold hard cash. The high bet is also accompanied with higher pays across the board compared to the regular version of Berryburst. While we’re not going to bore you with the exact details on how much every symbol pays compared the two versions, Berryburst Max has the largest possible win at 6,000x the wager, where as the regular Berryburst only goes as high as 3,000x the bet.

Despite the visuals being supposedly simple, each one has the familiar NetEnt polish that makes them shine. All icons are animated, slightly floating back and forth on the reels as the reels idle benefiting the fruit symbols more so than the card symbols. On the reels, you can find the diamond, the spade and the heart encased in bubbles, each with a different colour as lower paying symbols, followed by the kiwi and plums, then oranges, and finally, the berry as the most valuable symbol, living up to the slot’s name.

The only special feature the title offers players is expanding Wild and the re-spin that follows. If another Wild lands during the re-spin, it also expands, with the first one remaining in place and another re-spin is rewarded. It is possible, this way, to get a maximum of five re-spins.