Candy Cashcades

Slot Review (Blueprint Gaming)

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candy cashcades slot

Candy Cashcades: Overview

Sugar-filled slot Candy Cashcades is Blueprint Gaming‘s follow up to Sweet Success Megaways which was their first release of 2020. If you’ve played the Megaways version, you will be on familiar ground when spinning Candy Cashcades. Much of the first has been ported over – this goes for both the audio and visuals. However, the format has completely altered. The main change is now players get a grid slot to spin rather than a set of reels.

The same candy land mountain scene as before greets you when Candy Cashcades loads up. Hit the arrow to enter the game where you’ll find an 8×8 grid full of colourful pieces of candy. As well as painting a similar picture, Candy Cashcades has the same soundtrack as before. That means music which somehow manages to sound totally upbeat yet utterly depressing at the same time.

This is a little niche, but if you’ve ever seen one of those ‘Hug Me I’m Scared’ videos, the music is like the moment right before the puppets descend into a Kafka inspired nightmare. If this was Woodstock, you would not want to take the brown acid while playing. There is no telling what mental rabbit hole you could potentially trip down.

Candy Cashcades is playable from 10 p/c to $/€500 per tumble, on any device. RTP is a little lower than you usually see from Blueprint on 95.5%, while volatility is set to medium. It might share elements of their first grid slot, Dragonfall, but Candy Cashcades is a lot more forgiving, especially during the bonus game.

A cluster pays system is employed to reward players. At least 5 matching symbols connecting horizontally or vertically form a winning cluster up to 25+ in size for the biggest payouts. Every winning cluster causes a chain reaction via the cascade feature. Winning clusters are cleared off the board to allow new symbols to cascade down from above. This can create new clusters, and cascades continue until no more wins are generated.

The symbols involved include some from Sweet Success, plus some new ones which have crept in. There are 6 regular symbols – all are hard candies of various colours such as orange, purple, green, blue, red, and a pink heart. Land clusters of 25+ for payouts from 10x to 100x the stake.

Candy Cashcades: Features

candy cashcades
Candy Cashcades – free spins in action

After any non-winning cascade, Colossal Candies may be added. When the grid starts to shake, you’ll know one or more is on the way. Each Colossal Candy is a chocolate sweet at least 2×2 in size which drops onto the grid, converting any symbols it covers into one matching symbol. The wild is not converted by Colossal Candies.

The key to the most exciting bits is the red and white swirling candy wild. First of all, the wild substitutes for all other symbols to help make clusters. If a wild is part of a cluster win, it is not removed with the other symbols. Instead, it remains on the grid and moves to an empty adjacent position, where it sits for the next cascade.

Wilds also have a progressive multiplier attached which begins at x1. Whenever a wild is used in a winning cluster, the multiplier increases by +1. If more than one multiplier wild is involved in a win, their values are multiplied together. Wilds stay on the grid during cascade sequences even if they are not part of a winning cluster. When the sequence ends, multipliers reset to x1 and wilds are removed from the grid.

Should 3 or more wilds appear on screen, then 8 free Sugar Rush Win Falls are awarded. They are basically the same as regular spins, except each Win Fall awards a win, and a Colossal Candy is guaranteed to appear after non-winning cascades. Win Falls cannot be retriggered.

Candy Cashcades: Verdict

Blueprint Gaming is slowly but surely edging their way into the grid slot space, with Candy Cashcades their third incursion to date. So far, all three have used more or less the same features, though stats and math models have differed. Even so, they have yet to fully shake off the Jammin’ Jars imitation critique, and what Candy Cashcades offers will do little to change that impression.

That issue leads to the next. Candy Cashcades struggles to present a strong personality of its own. There are shades of several other slots going on here. From Sweet Bonanza to Jammin Jars, Fruit Party and so on. It’s like a menagerie of games got out of control one night and did something they all regretted in the morning. We’d need DNA testing to unpick the milkshake that went into its creation.

What doesn’t help, is that while Candy Cashcades is an ok grid slot, it doesn’t offer anything unique to make it stand out from the bunch. The base game is a little slow too. Decent cascade rolls are occasionally possible, plus Colossal Candies are there to mix things up. However, most of the time there are few sugar rushes, even the bonus game is pretty low key.

It feels like Candy Cashcades was purposefully designed this way to attract a different segment of the market. Those who enjoy Dragonfall, let’s say, won’t find anywhere near the same intensity here. Volatile rides have been eased back, replaced by Win Falls where the thrill and wins might be less, but they are guaranteed returns after all. On the subject of returns, the maximum win from a single game might be capped at $250,000 or 50,000 times the bet, but it seems unlikely to hit anything so high with what you have work with.

To sum up, Candy Cashcades is a decent enough grid slot which might suit players into the candy, light-hearted thing. Its generic nature means it’s unlikely to make much of a lasting impression though and it would be nice to see Blueprint break out of the formula for the next one.

Fair

Candy Cashcades provides an okay yet forgettable gaming experience, not helped by the recycling of features found in previous Blueprint grid slots.

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