As far as cheerful slots go, they rarely get as upbeat and sunny as Hacksaw Gaming‘s release, Hop’n’Pop. As this epic big win video attests, you don’t just play Hop’n’Pop for its feel-good factor. The game is one of those Hacksaw specials that looks friendly on the outside, but beneath the warmth lies a lethal set of mathematics. Catch it on a good day, like the lucky player in this clip, and you are looking at a grid slot/cluster pays combo that chains winners together with the best of them.
Hop’n’Pop is played on a 7×7 sized grid where the goal is landing clusters of at least five matching symbols. The real magic begins when three or more scatters land to trigger the free spins round. In this clip, three scatters award 10 free spins with one starting x2 multiplier, but if you land 4 or 5 scatters, the round starts with two x2 or four x4 multipliers, respectively.
It gets a little Jammin’ Jars here since multipliers leap around the board to new random positions between spins. One of the key differences between the two games is the multipliers in Hop’n’Pop are not wild in any way. When they leap onto a symbol that happens to be part of a winning cluster, they multiply its value. If more than one multiplier is part of the cluster, the values are added together to boost the win further. In one final plot twist, whenever a multiplier is used in a win, it either doubles its value, up to x64 at the most or creates another multiplier which leaps to a new position. At most, there can be four of them bouncing around the grid.
The clip in question starts with one x2 multiplier in play, but it doesn’t take long before all four have spawned on the board, steadily building their values as they rack up wins. It’s all a bit slow and steady for a while, as minor clusters squelch away and the round ticks over.
That is until the seventh spin sends the game into a frenzy. In particular, a 12 banana cluster (including wilds) links the two x64 multipliers together to produce an insane 5,120x the bet result all on its own. You kind of have to rub your eyes when it hits, as it just doesn’t seem right. Astonishingly, there’s even better to come. Spin number 9 produces the biggest hit of the round when 12 of the top-paying strawberries connect three multipliers to hit the game’s win cap of 12,500x the bet. Betting at $4 a spin equates to a collect of $50,000, not a bad result for stringing together a bunch of fruit.
In many ways, this clip exhibits the quintessential Hacksaw Gaming experience. Hop’n’Pop has bags of character, it’s deceptively simple yet packs huge numbers to go with fiendishly good gameplay. Hop’n’Pop is turning out to be a rather successful release for the studio, which was already gaining traction, and trending at Bigwinboard as the fourth most read review this week. Wins like this are sure to add considerable fuel to the fire, creating nothing but great publicity for a studio that is standing further and further out in the competitive iGaming scene.
