Fire Hopper slot by Push Gaming is the latest game from this innovative and niche UK developer and uses the grid format like Jammin' Jars 2 slot. A cartoon pond with lily leaves forms the background to the transparent columns with soft music and sound effects so a pretty juvenile look overall. So we have a format which began with Play'n Go's old Gemix slot and was subsequently copied by numerous developers like Netent with their Aloha! Cluster Pays slot for example. So can we hop across to some big wins for our bankroll here or will this leave us hopping mad?
On the grid...
A 7x7 grid greets us here where 5 to 20+ symbols in adjacent clusters are needed to win on Fire Hopper slot. The pays for the maximum 20+ and minimum of 5 various Lily symbols are: Red Lily 200/2x, Yellow 100/1x, Pink 50/0.5x, Purple, green or Blue 25/0.2x. Winning tiles are replaced from above in cascades. You can get Wild Frogs which increase their multiplier by 1x each time they eat a Firefly.
Special Symbols
You can also land a Firefly symbol, Prize Symbol (which can show 1-1000x bet) and a Bonus Firefly scatter anywhere in view. Any of them with the Wild Frog in view starts the Leaping Frog feature. When he lands on the Prize symbol you get the value, he can collect the Bonus Firefly scatter to add to your bonus meter and his Wild multiplier increases by 1x for each special symbol he lands on. He will also leave a Gold Wild Frog behind when he lands on any special symbol which will clock up the same multiplier as the leaping one, but don't leap themselves. The most common one to get is the basic Firefly which simply offers a chance of bigger base game hits via the Frog's Wild multipliers, which are multiplicative if more than one are part of a cluster.
Free Games
You need just the one Bonus Firefly and any Wild frog to trigger 7 free games. There are no extra spins or retriggers and your initial Wild frog on the trigger only increases in multiplier for each Firefly it lands on and doesn't reset between spins. So when further fireflies land they are given the multiplier the Frog has when it activates them, so if the Frog is x7 say and two drop in, the first will have 7x and second 8x, then your leaping frog will have 9x. Your Frog will also increase 1x for each Prize Symbol it lands on and will multiply the given value by it's multiplier. The Golden Frogs though disappear as used symbols when they count in any clusters so you'll only get one chance at their combined multipliers unlike with Jammin' Jars 2 where they remain and move about between free spins! So your chances of hitting the 50,000x maximum pay rely on a single lucky free spin where the Wild Frog has a good multiplier and several Fireflies land at once, close to each other, for a monster cluster multiplier.
Our View...
With a 96.30% RTP this game isn't bad despite its rather inane appearance. The trouble is, most players would have experienced the Jammin' Jars variant of this mechanic and the continuous excitement it builds up throughout the bonus. Here this is absent as rather than multiple big wins within one enthralling free spin, all your fun here is over in a flash as the combined Wilds count just the once then vanish. It's frustrating see a free spin with not a single firefly dropping in, or multiple ones coming with huge multipliers but so far a apart it's immediately obvious you aren't going to use more than one or even none. Sure, you can still get colossal wins but there's no adrenaline build up as there is with the aforementioned slot. For that reason alone, I'll be taking a leap back from this game...
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