No one can tell if a game is worth checking when unfamiliar with the key game features. We put the main focus of our Hot Pepper slot review on these things. Besides the common theme, this game has interesting essential features that cater to the needs of modern slot enthusiasts. It seems that the designers have added the best of all their slots in one place and improved some of them.
The Hot Pepper is one of the slot games that include standard features and a few innovative ones. Our Hot Pepper slot review will help you learn more as long as you read it to its end.
Theme – Mexican
Undoubtedly, the Hot Pepper slot has a Mexican theme. The title might suggest that it’s all about peppers, but that’s not true. Indeed, the peppers are important here, but the game lets you explore other aspects of Mexican culture and traditions, like pinatas, tacos, fruits, and more.
Besides two types of unique icons, you will find seven regular icons in this game, most closely related to the story. So, if we take the three playing card suits aside, the paytable includes four other basic symbols: a Lime, a Taco, a Pinata Bull, and a Mexican Guy. While talking about these icons, let’s mention that the Mexican Guy can provide prizes worth up to 50 times the stake.
Reels
Not 5, not 6, but 7 reels are available at the Hot Pepper slot. This is not your typical slot when it comes to the reels, and the same goes for the number of rows – 7. So, you are looking at a 7x7 layout.
Paylines
As some players might have guessed, this game has no paylines. The slot uses a cluster pays mechanic, which delivers prizes whenever players have five or more identical icons in a cluster (on adjacent horizontal and/or vertical positions) on the matrix.
RTP
Here’s another essential game feature that we will highlight in our review. The RTP reveals the theoretical returns you can expect from a slot after a long gaming session. Regarding Hot Pepper, the RTP is more than reasonable – 96.45%.
Don’t be surprised if you find a different Return to Player percentage in some online casinos. These gambling websites can alter the percentage according to their policies. In other words, Pragmatic Play only suggests a number that casino sites can follow. We made a list of some of the best casinos where you can play this game to highlight the difference. Also, we would like to point out that players must consider other things when joining a casino for this purpose, like the casino welcome bonuses and deals, selection of titles, banking solutions, customer support, licenses, etc.
This table includes information about some of the UK’s best online casinos where you can play the Hot Pepper slot and its RTPs. For a general overview of the slot sites we recommend, visit our page created for this purpose.
Stake Range
It’s great when players have multiple options for their bets. The Hot Pepper slot is one of these games with over a dozen solutions. They can alter the bet size (1 to 10) and the coin value (£0.01 to £0.5) before choosing the total bet amount (£0.2 to £100).
Max Win
Both the base game and free spin rounds have a limited maximum win amount. The good thing is that this limitation is more than reasonable – 10,000x the bet.
Tumble Feature
Sometimes it’s called an Avalanche feature; in other cases, developers label it as a Tumble feature. In any case, these are similar (if not the same) features that promise additional chances of hitting winning combos.
Namely, the game will destroy the winning icons whenever you land a winning combination and receive the prize. The rest of the icons will move to the bottom, filling the gaps with new symbols. This tumbling continues until you run out of new winning patterns.
Free Spins
This game has the Sun as a Bonus icon. Players with three Suns across a single Tumble sequence will activate Free Spins. More precisely, they will receive 12 free spins, but hitting three Bonus icons during this mode across a Tumble sequence will re-trigger the round and provide 5 extra spins. Also, the Wilds created by clusters are at level 5 during free spins. More about this is available in the next section of our review.
Random Wild Multiplier Feature
Another thing that makes the Hot Pepper slot different is the four Wild icons in the shape of Peppers in different colors. These Peppers count as any primary symbol to help you form winning combinations. They are generated when a cluster explodes. This event will also trigger a progressive feature for the consecutive Tumble sequence. It starts at level 1 and goes up to level 5. With their help, clusters of 5/6, 7/8, 9/10, or 11+ icons create multipliers with values of x1 to x128.
Jackpot
Hot Pepper is among the many slots that don’t possess a direct jackpot prize. Those who wish to play such titles can always check our page for the best jackpot slot games.
Play Experience & First Impressions
Hitting winning combinations while playing a slot game is fun. But what’s even more exciting is landing big wins. Unfortunately, we didn’t get both from the Hot Pepper slot, which is something you can see from our 100-spin test session’s RTP – 46.2%. So, we witnessed many wins, but they were usually worth under 1 time our bet. The Tumbles didn’t help much because they usually ended quickly. We also saw the multipliers on the Wilds. Still, they didn’t work until we activated the random wild multiplier feature in the 89th spin and won 26.7 times our stake.
So, lucky players can expect a lot from this feature and probably from the free spins, which we didn’t activate during our test. Besides this, the game gave us the good old feeling we used to have when watching animated movies.
