Red Hot BBQ

Red Hot BBQ: Slot Overview

You know, when you see a chilli pepper perspiring, there is a chance your taste buds are probably going to have some regrets. Maybe not, though, if the pepper in question has eyes and a big toothy grin. Such is one of the characters that greets players to Red Hot BBQ, an online slot from software provider Red Tiger. Into this bowl of tonsil tingling ingredients, Red Tiger has tossed additional spices in the form of a Mystery Sauce extra and free spins with a symbol upgrade progression component, plus a bonus buy feature.

Actually, bowl is not the right word to describe Red Hot BBQ, as its gaming takes place on a barbecuing apparatus seen from a bird's eye top-down view perspective. No kitchen was harmed in the making of Red Hot BBQ (we presume) as the action is held out of doors on a cobbled stoned patch of the garden, surrounded by grass, leaves, and a bag of charcoal. Everything on screen has been attractively drawn, so Red Hot BBQ Might be good for mentally squinting and pretending it's summer in the back garden with buds about to knock back a few cold beverages and grill stuff.

Red Tiger has designed Red Hot BBQ to run on any device, and it accepts wagers of 10 p/c to $/€80 per spin. Alternatively, players can skip to the main courses, so to speak, by buying either of the 2 features. When playing in the default mode, the game has a theoretical return to player value of 95.66%, edging up to 96.75% when engaging the Feature Buy. Its gaming area is made of 5-reels, holding 3 symbols each, with 20 paylines running along the matrix.

Players get a win along paylines when at least 3 matching symbols land on adjacent reels, starting on the leftmost reel. As you might imagine, food items feature heavily on the paytable, and 6 of them have been used as the highest pay symbols, looking progressively more aggressive the higher their value. High pays are called barbecue symbols and consist of Garlic, Onion, Serrano, Jalapeno, Habanero, and Ghost Pepper symbols. For lows, four fairly benign though flame-coated J-A card rank symbols appear. When hitting a 5-of-a-kind winning line, payouts vary from 1 to 3 times the bet for the low pays and 4 to 15 times the bet for the highs.

Red Hot BBQ: Slot Features

Red Hot BBQ does not have any sort of wild symbol in its arsenal, so the remaining symbols to cover are Mystery Sauce scatters and Free Spins symbols.

Mystery Sauce

Mystery Sauce symbols are scatters that can land in any position on the board. When Mystery symbols hit, they all reveal the same regular pay symbol. It's important to note that they only reveal barbecue symbols, not low-pay royals.

Free Spins

Landing 3, 4, or 5 of the free spins scatters anywhere on the grid triggers the bonus game, awarding 9, 12, or 15 free spins, respectively. During free spins, Mystery Sauce scatters may land with a small pepper marker on them. These pepper markers are collected by the Hot Bar, which only happens in free spins.

The Hot Bar is made up of 5 stages, and each stage takes 3 steps to fill. Each stage displays one of the barbecue symbols in ascending order. When 3 steps of a stage are filled, its corresponding symbol is upgraded to the next symbol on the Hot Bar and only appears as the upgraded symbol on the reels for the remainder of the round. If all stages of the Hot Bar are filled, then only the top-value Ghost Pepper will appear from the barbecue symbols. Royals are unaffected, so they continue to land. In addition, filling the first 2 stages of the Hot Bar awards +2 free spins, filling each of the next 2 stages awards +3 free spins, while filling the 5th stage awards +5 free spins.

Buy Feature

The bonus buy feature provides two buy options. These are a spin guaranteeing at least 3 Mystery Sauce scatters for 5x the bet, or the free spins feature for 70x the bet.

Red Hot BBQ: Slot Verdict

There are some ideas that repeatedly return to flavour online slots, and for whatever reason, red hot peppers of the chilli variety (not the band) are one of them. Maybe it's a natural offshoot of the flames/flaming seven motifs which adorn a lot of classically designed slots? If it is, then we can probably assume that chilli slots are going to be around for quite a while to come, as well. If any studio is doing its part to keep the genre motoring on, it is Red Tiger, which along with Red Hot BBQ, has also seasoned reels with slots like Wild Hot Chilli Reels and Hot Hot Chilli Pot. Someone at the studio appears to like their dishes heavily spiced.

Despite the relatively large number of chilli slots, there isn't a huge number of them which are overly memorable, though. With the exception of, say, Big Time Gaming's slot Extra Chilli it's hard to recall many that have made much of a mark. After reviewing Red Hot BBQ, it doesn't seem like this one will set the iGaming world's tastebuds alight too much, either. Don't get us wrong, it's a handsomely presented game, with a couple of features that have the ability to play nicely with each other at times, but there's nothing particularly unique on offer here to attempt chowing down on a virtual Ghost Pepper for. The Mystery Sauce feature works fine while feeding the Hot Bar with pepper markers in free spins, and progressing through upgrades wasn't an overly taxing task during the review, even going all the way to the Ghost Pepper at one stage. With a max win of 1,110x the bet, though, the game doesn't get super hot.

Ah well, not every player wants to metaphorically stuff the hottest pepper down their oesophagus when participating in an online slot. Maybe those who favour the slot equivalent of more 'mild and lemony' on the heat scale will warm to the charms of Red Hot BBQ and its cheeky crew of barbecue symbols.