Bugs Money

Bugs Money: Slot Overview

Bugs Bunny - Bugs Money, geddit? Pretty clever name from Yggdrasil Gaming partner Reflex Gaming in its online slot about bees, and not a Warner Brothers licensed game full of classic cartoon characters. Instead of 'What's up, Doc?', in Bugs Money, features like Glow Wilds, free spins with potentially colossal win multipliers, and a massive max win figure collide to create one of Reflex Gaming's most impactful slots to date.

It doesn't start massively impactful, though; quite the opposite. A simple forest scene presents itself on-screen, where trees flank the game grid, and bushes make up the foreground. It's all very pleasantly basic, cartoonish, and not at all like a typical Reflex Gaming slot, which have often felt like they've leapt right out of the 1990s/2000s. Initially, there's not much about Bugs Money that indicates its tightly coiled math model, features, or winning capabilities. At the start, it's like a friendly bumble bee busily focused on crawling over flowers, collecting pollen before bringing it back to the hive for the next stage of honey production.

The next stage in the inspection is a look at Bugs Money's math model and general characteristics. First of all, players should be aware that Bugs Money comes in a quad of RTP configurations with the highest coming in at 95.5%. In general, the volatility has been rated as high, but with four free spins options, players have some influence over the volatility of the bonus round, at least. Other choices include bet selection, where the base levels start at 20 p/c per spin, and if available, clicking on the Golden Bet increases the stake by 50% in exchange for doubling the chance of triggering free spins. To minimize liability, it seems, the default max bet has been limited to only €/$1, though it could be higher depending on operator settings.

Bugs Money is played on an equally simple 5-reel, 3-row, game grid, crossed by 10 fixed paylines. At least three low pays or two high pays are required to form a winning combination, beginning on the left side of the grid, over consecutive reels. The low pay symbols are colourful patterned clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades, worth 5x the bet for five-of-a-kind, whereas the highs are an adorable set consisting of a flower, a blue-winged butterfly, a ladybug, and a purple/yellow butterfly. Land a winning line of five of the premiums gets you 20 to 100 times the stake. The wilds are stoppered bottles with fireflies present on all reels, substituting for all regular pay symbols.

Bugs Money: Slot Features

Bugs Money doesn't exactly load on the features, but what's here could be quite surprising with what they produce. Topics to cover are Glow Wilds and free spins.

Glow Wilds

The Glow Wilds reel modifier can trigger on any base or bonus game spin. When triggered, glow bugs appear on random reel positions, adding wild symbols.

Free Spins

Landing 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols in the main game triggers the free spins round plus a payout of 8x, 40x, or 200x the bet, respectively. The next step is picking one of the four free spin options:

• 3 free spins with a win multiplier range of x5, x10, x20, or x50.
• 7 free spins with a win multiplier range of x3, x5, x10, or x20.
• 10 free spins with a win multiplier range of x2, x3, x5, or x10.
• 15 free spins with a win multiplier range of x1, x2, x3, or x5.

On each free spin, a win multiplier is awarded from the applicable range, as noted above. Landing 3 scatters on reels 1, 3, and 5 in the round retriggers it, and the originally chosen amount of free spins are awarded again. What's new in free spins is the presence of the Queen Bee symbol on reel 3. When the Queen Bee hits, the win multiplier is increased by x10, so in the best-case scenario, for example, the x50 would become x500. The Queen Bee is also wild, so she substitutes for all symbols except scatters.

Bugs Money: Slot Verdict

Reflex Gaming slots have tended to have an odd feel about them which was both over and under-produced at the same time if that makes sense. This is the studio which gave us rather awkward slots like Moley Moolah, Krazy Klimber, or Sea God, after all, and there was some sort of presumption Reflex Gaming had aimed at an esoteric sector of the market with a penchant for old school or at least old looking games with peculiar gameplay and where it felt at times like the studio was as interested in punking players as entertaining them. Bit harsh, perhaps, but just voicing an impression as the resulting games didn't exactly rock our worlds.

For Bugs Money, the studio has tightened the audio-visuals, and the features, keeping things more streamlined to produce a higher-quality game. It's not as refined or as sophisticated as Push Gaming's Wilds Swarm as a comparison, perhaps. However, Bugs Money's visuals didn't immediately cause our eyes to revolt as they sometimes do with a Reflex Gaming product, and a browse over the paytable caused an unusually high degree of intrigue. Simply put, Bugs Money has a huge winning potential of 55,028 times the bet (which is its main selling point) and a smart bonus round with enough latent power to attempt cracking big numbers. Bugs Money's bonus round is basic in a sense – free spins with a win multiplier, yet it is very volatile, and can go bananas, especially should the Queen Bee drop in to jack the win multiplier further.

Fair dues, without the massive max win number, Bugs Money might not have been half as an enticing proposal. Whilst pleasant to behold, it's not the most striking game nor the most sophisticated. But it does have big potential, plus the rest of the game is simply attractive, so when factoring in some already decent premium symbol values, Bugs Money has all the components needed to pack a rather potent wallop.