Fat Santa

Fat Santa (Push Gaming): Introduction

Push Gaming has had a remarkable run this year with strong titles such as Tiki Tumble, Wild Swarm, Jammin Jars, and Fat Rabbit. All of these have been trending on Bigwinboard.com as well as within the casino streaming community, and for good reasons.

Contrary to many of the big established providers that have seen a decline in popularity, Push Gaming is an intelligent and perceptive company that is keeping an ear to the ground, something that has enabled them to provide players with engaging games they genuinely love to play. While the overall increase in potential and variance certainly has done its share to give the studio a much-needed boost, there's a lot more finesse and sophistication to it than that. Push Gaming develops slots that are both charming, unique and inventive, and looking at this year's line of slots we see a great deal of diversity as well.

Fat Santa is Push Gaming's November release and builds on the success of Fat Rabbit. The lush green landscape has been replaced with a snowy backdrop, and instead of carrots players will be looking out for pies. Those of you who have played Fat Rabbit know what it's all about. This is a medium to high variance game that is all about the bonus, which by the way can be frustratingly hard to trigger. However, when the rabbit finally catches the carrot, or in this case, when Santa gets his hands on the pie, you can look forward to an intense feature-packed with massive potential.

Fat Santa is a 5-reel, 5-row slot with 50 pay lines. Playable on all devices, players can bet between €0.25 to €25 which is considerably lower than the €100 max bet on Fat Rabbit. Other than that, both games share the same setup regarding the value of the symbols, pay lines, reel set as well as the 96.45% RTP.

Fat Santa (Push Gaming): Symbols, Paytable & Sleigh Feature

A quick look at the pay table reveals that it's identical to Fat Rabbit aside from the actual characters obviously. The wooden low-value card suit symbols have been replaced by Christmas ornaments while the premiums here are represented by Snowmen, reindeers, Christmas elf's, and Santas, the latter being the most lucrative which yields a 20 times the stake win for 5 across a full pay line.

As the symbols appear fully stacked on the reels there is potential for some decent wins in the main game, especially with the help of the Sleigh feature that randomly comes into play now and then. When activated, Santa will shoot across the screen with his flying reindeers while throwing wilds at the reels. It rarely results in any notable wins so don't expect too much of it.

Fat Santa (Push Gaming): Free Spins

While the option to buy bonus features has been around long before Big Time Gaming started making use of it, it was them who brought it into the mainstream and unequivocally set the trend. As we have seen in Yggdrasil's upcoming game Dark Vortex, for example, others have recently started to do the same thing. Fat Santa will be Push Gaming's first online slot with a Buy-A-Bonus option and like so, players will be taken directly to the free spins feature for the cost of 80 times the stake. Of course, players can also trigger the free spins game the conventional way by landing a Santa symbol along with one or more Wild Christmas Pie symbols.

Starting off with 5 free spins, the objective is for Santa to find and eat as many pies as possible. For every group of 5 pie wilds collected the Santa wild symbol will increase in size. Starting off as a 1x1 symbol, Santa can grow as large as 5x5 to cover the whole reel set. Furthermore, each increase in size brings with it additional free spins.

Fat Santa (Push Gaming): Conclusion

Seeing how challenging it can be to trigger the bonus in Fat Rabbit, adding a Buy-A-Bonus option does make some sense now that it has become more accepted and normalised. Initially, we thought Fat Santa was much more volatile than its sibling Fat Rabbit because of the considerably lower max bet, but turns out it's actually slightly less volatile. The same goes for the max win potential it seems. Either way, this game is all about the bonus where there is potential for massive wins should you activate the 5x5 Santa Wild in particular.

Naturally, we were hoping for something more original, but at the same time, we're glad Fat Santa turned out to be something more than just a straight-up clone thank's to the addition of the Buy-A-Bonus option, which without a doubt will make this version more popular than its predecessor.