La Bomba

La Bomba Introduction

First of all, yes it's an extremely odd choice of theme. Also, one must ask - what came first, the idea of turning bombs, girls and Mexico into a slot, or the wordplay on La Bamba? In an attempt to further intensify the comical aspect, mice carrying Molotovs are seen running across the screen only to blow up midpoint. Apparently, the story (if you can call it that) unfolds in the sleepy village of San Perezoso and centers around the main character miss Guadalupe. She's a girl that likes to play with her bombs, quite literarily. Whether she's a terrorist or just a pyromaniac we'll never know, however.

La Bomba, which is a 5-reel, 25 payline video slot that is playable on all devices from €0.25, is another collaboration between the Canadian software developer Side City Studios and NextGen Gaming. As you might have figured out by now, if you frequently visit our site, we're not huge fans of these joint efforts as they all too often turn out disastrous.

La Bomba Symbols & Features

Argh, these paytables! We're dumbfounded as to why so many game developers stick to this old fashioned way of deliberately deceiving players. "Payline and scatter wins are multiplied by the coin value". What!? Which coin value? Where? How? These type of shenanigans has less to do with sticking to traditions than tricking players into thinking the horrible payouts are better than they actually are.

The paytable is indeed painful to look at, not only visually. The symbols are represented by cartoonish style cherry bombs, dynamite, Molotovs, powder kegs, cacti, plants, bells, and Señora Guadalupe, the latter being worth 20 times the stake for 5 across a payline. None of the symbols appears stacked on the reels, and the lack of main game features makes it quite awful to play.

The wild is represented by a bomb or BOMBA symbol as they call it. It only appears on reels 2, 3 and 4 and plays a significant role in this game as you will see.

La bomba Free Spins

The free games feature is activated when landing 3 BOMBA symbols on the middle three reels, which then awards 5 free spins. The way the free spins mode is played is a bit different from what you may have seen before. The amount you win when triggering the free spins is displayed above the reels accordingly:

• Reel 2 displays the amount won when triggering the free spins, for example, €15.
• Reel 3 displays the amount won times 2, in our case €30.
• Reel 4 displays the amount won times 3, in our case €45.

Now, each time a BOMB symbol drops on either of the middle reels, the amount displayed above the reel is paid out. Furthermore, 2 BOMB symbols award 1 additional free spin, while 3 of them will give you 2 extra free spins.

The free spins game is basically a cash prize type bonus with potential for quite a lot of retriggers, which is what you need if you want to walk away with a decent win.

La Bomba Conclusion

It's hard to say for sure what kind of potential lies within this slot since there appears to be no limit on how many times it can retrigger in the free games feature. Say you would trigger the bonus with a 5 of a kind top symbol along with the 3 wild symbol it takes to initiate the bonus, there's actually room for some good wins around 3-400 times the stake per spin. It's a bit discouraging, however, having to depend on such an unlikely event to unfold to have a shot at a meaningful win.

With that said, the free spins were relatively frequent, dropping at a rate of 1 per 60 or so spins (we could have just been lucky at the time of course), with the best one giving a return of just under 100 times the stake. It could be worth a try should you feel stuck playing only ultra-high variance slots, although there are much more entertaining slots to play than La Bomba.