Crazy Digginz

Crazy Digginz: Slot Overview

Ever been out in public, wandering around the supermarket or somewhere else equally mundane and bumped into someone you haven't seen for ages and who isn't on social network that you know of? Such chance encounters often go one of two ways – either they're a fabulous reacquaintance with a long-lost chum or are a totally awkward situation where both parties mumble greetings before fleeing in separate directions. Reviewing Crazy Digginz by Games Global partner Pulse 8 Studios was like a mixture of both of those scenarios. A warm reconnection with a familiar style, combined with an awkward shock, which raised a number of questions.

Taking things back a step might explain just what the heck we're talking about. A few months before this review took place, we crossed paths with one or two games like The Legend of Musashi and Dungeon Tower from Armenian outfit Peter & Sons, which looked decidedly less Peter & Sons than they usually do. This prompted questions along the lines of - is P&S branching off, trying a new style, or experimenting with different art forms? Now, it looks as though, maybe, possibly, the art person responsible for P&S's distinctive style may have shacked up with Games Global partner Pulse 8 Studios. The resemblance is simply too uncanny to be merely coincidental or even imitation. Srs, if we didn't know better, we'd have been sure Crazy Digginz was a P&S piece.

Crazy Digginz, as the name alludes to, is a video slot that borrows the time-honoured theme of mining to dress up its back-end mathematics. Speaking of the back end, Crazy Digginz has been classed as a slot with a highly volatile math model, available in four RTP configurations ranging from 96.02% down to 86.79%, depending on the market. At the default setting, players choose a stake of 20 p/c to $/€20 per spin and can use a tablet, mobile, or desktop device to get the slot pick a swingin'.

Played on a 5-reel, 3-row gaming matrix, 20 paylines have been built in to land winning combinations across. Five-of-a-kind wins are the most lucrative, triggering payouts of 3 to 5 times the bet for five of the 10-A card royals or 8 to 40 times the stake for five picks, hammers, blue gems, green gems, or red gems. Crazy Digginz counts several types of wild symbols amongst its number, including a regular wild symbol which appears on reels 2, 3, and 4 and can substitute for anything except the scatter symbols and the Special Wild symbols.

Crazy Digginz: Slot Features

As well as Special Wild symbols, Crazy Digginz also comes with Crazy Mode, a bonus round, and where available, a bonus buy option plus a Win Booster.

Special Wilds

Allmine, Flint and Morpho are the Special Wilds. They are present on reels 2-4, and when they hit, each one performs a specific modifying ability:

• Allmine (The Collector) – collects an x1 multiplier from all high symbols without a multiplier attached or the multiplier from high pays that have one. The total is added as a multiplier to the Allmine symbol.
• Flint (The Spreader) – randomly distributes multipliers to all symbols except scatter symbols.
• Morpho (The Upgrader) – randomly upgrades medium or low pay symbols to random high pay symbols.

Only one symbol of each type of Special Wild can appear on a spin and Special Wilds substitute for all symbols except the scatter.

Crazy Mode

Crazy Mode randomly triggers in the base or bonus game. When active, Crazy Mode increases the rewards from Special Wilds. Allmine collects double the value of multipliers attached to high pays; Flint randomly distributes 8-14 multipliers to all symbols except scatters, and Morpho randomly upgrades two types of medium or low symbols to one random kind of high symbols.

Bonus

Landing 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols triggers up to 12 free spins and Special Wild features. The Special Wilds are determined by the number of triggering scatters. Specifically, 3 scatter symbols unlock Allmine, 4 bonus symbols unlock Allmine and Flint, whereas 5 bonus symbols unlock Allmine, Flint, and Morpho. Landing 3 scatter symbols on a free spin retriggers them and activates other Special Wild features. Most importantly, the Special Wilds allocated to each bonus round remain on the grid for the duration of the feature, jumping between reels 2-4 during free spins.

Buy Bonus/Win Booster

These features may be jurisdiction dependent, so if the Win Booster button is there, activating it increases the chance of landing Special Wilds, scatter symbols, or high symbols in the base game. Switching the Win Booster on increases the bet by x2. Next is the bonus buy. Here players can buy free spins triggered by 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols for 79x, 299x, or 1,999x the bet, respectively.

Crazy Digginz: Slot Verdict

After rubbing our eyes after the shock of seeing a Peter & Sons game, yet not a Peter & Sons game, it was time to put Crazy Digginz through its paces. And you know what? It wasn't bad; it wasn't bad at all. Before now, Pulse 8 Studios' games haven't exactly blown too much hair back, but that might be about to change. No matter how Crazy Digginz ends up being received, it feels like the studio has really pulled out a few stops to create some sort of blip on the iGaming radar. A big blip, or one eclipsed by other blips? Time will tell, yet there are one or two things about Crazy Digginz that merit a deeper inspection.

The first thing is the visuals which barely dimmed in uncanniness even when the playthrough was done. If there was an online slot award for doppelganger of the year, Crazy Digginz would be a strong contender. Putting this to one side, Crazy Digginz brought it in terms of gaming. This thing, in the right conditions, can go code red – up to a maximum of 68,000x the bet. After seeing Crazy Digginz in action, that figure doesn't seem as pie in the sky as it initially did. The game unequivocally reached its pinnacle when all three Special Wilds were bouncing about the place in free spins, which could get absolutely insane, and the significant buy cost reflects this. Multipliers are distributed there, symbols upgrading there, and multiplier values are collected in another spot. The result was obstreperous mayhem - when it was on a good roll.

Before now, Pulse 8 Studios seemed content floating along, talking a big game but not exactly releasing the sort of slots which really backed up the boasts. Has Crazy Digginz changed this perception? In some ways, yeah. The studio appears to have bolstered the design team, come up with some wild ideas, and then crucially given the gameplay enough room to really shine (when it's firing) while bolting on masses of potential. Questions remain over the poached Peter & Sons' looks, which is one of Crazy Digginz' biggest talking points, yet when the chatter dies down, what remains is a rock-solid mining slot that gives the kings of the genre a run for their money.