Joker Bombs

Joker Bombs: Slot Overview

Maestros of mobile-focused slots, Hacksaw Gaming, ease up on the creative brainstorming to craft Joker Bombs, a game that many may find familiar. Joker Bombs takes more than a few cues from Pragmatic Play's back catalogue of slots - their scatter pays slots, Sweet Bonanza and Gates of Olympus specifically. Like Pragmatic's earlier releases, Joker Bombs is a pay anywhere style game, which relies on a combination of cascades and multiplier symbols to power its way to comparatively modest max wins by Hacksaw standards.

Held in a sunny fairground, a Ferris Wheel sits in the background while a roller coaster track whizzes past and balloons hover to the left of the 6x5 game panel. It's a bit like Super Silly Fun Land in Despicable Me, where Gru disintegrates that Space Killer attraction to win a unicorn soft toy. Joker Bombs might appear super chilled in the beginning, but it won't take long to realise it means as much business as just about anything else Hacksaw has done.

Okay, it might not be as brutal as they get from Hacksaw, though the volatility (technically rated 3 out of 5) is not to be trifled with. The RTP is variable, as often is the case, so be on the lookout for that. The best one has a return value of 96.48%, though it can be set significantly lower, so it pays to check. Hit frequency, meanwhile, is roughly one in four, or 23.54%, tiding you over till free spins trigger – or it is possible to buy them, depending on jurisdiction.

Playable from 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin, like the aforementioned Pragmatic Plays slots, wins occur when at least 8 matching symbols appear on the game grid, no matter where they land, like scatters basically. Five balloons of various shapes adorn the lower portion of the paytable, worth up to 5-15 times your stake when 15+ are in view. Moving along to the four candy looking premiums, these are worth 50-200x the stake when 15+ are on the reels. Obviously, there is no wild symbol to go worth the scatter pays, which could've been interesting, so the remaining tiles are joker scatters and multiplier bombs.

Joker Bombs: Slot Features

Both jokers and bombs appear throughout as special symbols. The base game is padded out with cascades and bomb multipliers, while free spins are the same but with theoretically more special symbols on the reels.

Cascades

When wins appear, the symbols involved are removed from the reels, allowing the remaining symbols to fall down into the gaps. This can produce consecutive wins, and cascades only come to an end when no more wins appear.

Multiplier Bombs

During each spin, any winning combination prize is displayed at the top of the screen as a pending win amount. If one or more bomb symbols lands during the spin, their multiplier values are combined together. At the end of the cascade/win sequence, multiplier values are added or multiplied and applied to the total win amount. There are three types of bombs:

• Normal Bomb – this one lands with the multiplier visible. Possible outcomes are x2, x3, or x4. These values are added to the win multiplier.
• Revealing Bomb – lands with a question mark on it and reveals x5, x10, x25, or x50. These values are also added to the win multiplier.
• Epic Bomb – lands with an 'X' on it and reveals values of x2, x3, x4, x5, or x10. Unlike the other two bombs, this value is not added to the win multiplier but multiplies it.

Free Spins

Land at least 3 jack in the box joker symbols in the base game to be awarded 10 free spins. During this feature, there are more multiplier bombs, and there is a higher chance of landing the higher value ones than in the base game. The round is extended when 3 joker symbols land anywhere on the grid, awarding +5 additional free spins.

Bonus Buy

It may be possible to buy free spins when playing Joker Bombs. If it is, the cost is 100x the base bet and comes with a slightly reduced RTP of 96.46%.

Joker Bombs: Slot Verdict

Hey, we know people imitate people in all walks of life and nowhere is this more obviously done than in the online slot world. It was still a surprise to see Hacksaw Gaming of all people copying the work of a fellow designer so closely. We're used to Hacksaw leading us somewhere new, doing things on reels that might not always shake the industry to its core but are nevertheless uniquely quirky. Joker Bomb is an anomaly. It's definitely quirky due to the bubble gum visuals and music, which accentuate the carefree vibe, yet when the game is rolling it can be anything but carefree.

What this means is Joker Bombs was a really unpredictable ride. Repeated bonus buys proved strangely difficult to translate into positive results, despite there technically being more special symbols on the reels. Perhaps it was an unlucky run. Anyway, the key appears to be the Epic Bomb. Getting that one in tandem with one or two Normal Bombs proved to be effective for squeezing something decent out of Joker Bombs. Should you manage to squeeze every last drop out of the game, the max win is 5,000x the bet, respectable yet kind of low(ish) compared to other games Hacksaw has been making recently.

Joker Bombs was an unusual slot to review from Hacksaw, lacking their typically sky-high individuality. There's nothing glaringly off about Joker Bombs; it plays as well as Sweet Bonanza does while offering multipliers in the base game like Gates of Olympus. There aren't a huge number of scatter paying slots out there, so it's another option if you want to look at it from that angle. Let's just say Joker Bombs was okay but not their best work.