If you’ve been following developer Avatar UX‘s journey, a couple of things stand out so far. Just about all of their releases to date have been PopWins powered slots, and most come with massive winning potential. It started with PopRocks‘ huge 72,188x and has continued in a similar vein from there. So bold are some of the stats it is hard not to take them with a grain of salt – until now.
The slot in question is HippoPop (Powered by Yggdrasil Gaming), and after seeing what it is capable of, sceptical players will have to reassess their views on the power of PopWins. We’re not just talking about a game achieving its max win here. No, no, HippoPop utterly annihilates its official max win figure, which, as it turns out, was clearly the best result Avatar UX achieved in testing rather than a hard cap.
It happened to a fortunate Brazilian player, betting in Brazilian Reals, and picks up at the start of a bonus game. In HippoPop, free spins are triggered when all reels expand to 6 reels high in the base game or by buying them for 85x the bet. Either way, players are awarded 5 free spins, with the option of spinning a bonus wheel to potentially win more or losing the lot. In this clip, two successful bonus wheel spins mean the round starts with 9 free spins and an initial win multiplier of x9.
How HippoPop’s free spins work is that winning symbols are removed from the grid and replaced with two new symbols. This increases the size of the reels (up to 8 high), boosts ways to win, and increases the win multiplier by +1. As you’d imagine, the win multiplier does not reset during free spins. The final crucial point is when all reels reach 6, 7, or 8 cells high, the top paying golden hippo symbol is worth x2, x3, or x4 its normal value.
Right, now we’ve covered the small print, on with the show. After a couple of dead spins, the clip steadily demonstrates everything HippoPop’s bonus round can do. Reels steadily increase in height until reaching the full 8 rows, thereby applying the x4 to the golden hippo and awarding additional free spins. Solid, but nothing all-time… until the very last spin goes berserk, that is. The next thing we know, 16 x4 hippos have been dumped across all five reels. This combo on its own is worth 4,608 times the base bet – before the x23 win multiplier has even been factored in. After the win multiplier is applied, the resulting count up is a bit like visiting the US Debt Clock website.
Once the poppin’s done and the dust clears, some phenomenal numbers emerge. The final payout comes to R$2,689,337.50, which converts to around €440,782, or 107,573.5 times the bet. Since HippoPop’s official max win was 48,150x, no one is probably more surprised than Avatar UX themselves. A staggering result and a hit like this puts the PopWins range in a different light and is bound to increase its desirability amongst big win chasers.
