Spicy Meatballs Megaways

Spicy Meatballs Megaways: Slot Overview

Foodies, here's one for you. Big Time Gaming has brought the new chef in town, and former Chilli-stand owner, José, to the reels in an eccentrically designed slot titled Spicy Meatballs Megaways. So good is José at the grill people fly in from all over the world to sample his 'a-Balls' - BTG's words here, by the way. Mixing Mt Cashmore Beef and an old Sicilian recipe means these meatballs aren't just flavoursome but lend themselves to a multiplying wild feature. Coupled with free spins, Spicy Meatballs is capable of rummaging up spicy wins in both game phases.

Played using a 6-reel setup, the Megaways game grid is located in a cooker in what has been described as Will Barnes' kitchen - Will Barnes being the given name of casino streamer 'The Hideous'. Quite why the game is linked to Will Barnes is a mystery that is never quite resolved. In any case, it's a busy kitchen where pots blaze on elements above the reels, whilst various ingredients flank the game area, and extra cookware hangs on the wall behind it. The game has a mood, not 100 miles from Beef Lightning Megaways since each game focuses on a mundane side of life rather than something instantly exotic. As in both games, however, a regular everyday theme is no indicator of the thrills each can produce.

Completing the picture, Spicy Meatballs has a soundtrack that comes across as a Soviet-era disco but is actually a piece titled Tarantella Napoletana. If the name doesn't ring a bell, think Italian pizza song, and you will no doubt have heard it before. In fact, if you put the words 'Italian pizza song' into YouTube, it will take you straight to it. Blasting across the music are occasional shoutouts, such as 'spicy meatballs', tying the game a little tighter to The Hideous, being one of his catchphrases.

When hitting spin, 2-7 symbols appear on each reel, creating up to 117,649 ways to win. Matching symbols left to right create winning combinations which are then removed from the reels by the reaction feature, and new symbols drop into the empty cells. New wins can form from the same spin, and this process continues to fire off coins until no new combinations are created. The cook-off occurs on any device, where bets from 20 p/c to $/€15 may be set. Like any good spicy meatball, the action is highly volatile, with the math model generating a return value of 96.57% - the game's only setting, by the way.

Perusing the paytable like a restaurant menu, we find 9-A card royals as the low-value symbols, pulling in wins worth 0.7 to 0.9 times the stake for six of a kind. There are plenty of fruit slots around, yet Spicy Meatballs is one of the few vegetable slots as high pays include green capsicums, blue chillies, tomatoes, and eggplants. These ingredients are worth 1 to 10 times the stake for a six of a kind combination. Rounding off this section is one of the wild symbols you will encounter in Spicy Meatballs. This is the wild hat, landing on reels 2 to 5, to substitute for every symbol except the wild meatball, that one's next.

Spicy Meatballs Megaways: Slot Features

Wild meatballs are pretty useful in not only cobbling together wins but helping you chain together the 5 or more reactions needed to trigger free spins. Wild meatballs may be added to any base game spin or reaction at the top of reels 2 to 5 – up to 2 at once. As well as substitute for all symbols, wild meatballs begin with the multiplier displayed on the pot above it on the reel. The multiplier increases by 1 for every row that the wild meatball moves down during a reaction sequence. They stay on screen during reactions until falling off the bottom of the reel or when no more wins occur. Multipliers reset to default in the base game.

Landing 5 consecutive reactions awards 8 free spins, with +1 extra spin awarded for each reaction past 5. Multipliers on the pots carry over to the bonus game, which guarantees a wild meatball on every free spin. When 5 or more reactions occur in free spins, +4 additional free spins are awarded plus 1 more for each reaction beyond the fifth. Unlike the base game, multipliers do not reset between free spins.

Spicy Meatballs Megaways: Slot Verdict

Spicy Meatballs Megaways whips up something rather tasty in the kitchen, and every ingredient has the trademark BTG refinement to it. From a statistical standpoint, the game is rock solid, as you'd expect from the Aussie studio, and it makes great use of an unusual theme. You kind of have to dig into the Spicy Meatballs backstory to make sense of it, or at least add depth to what could come across as a plain old kitchen otherwise. Like sprinkling in a pinch of salt, taking the time to read the game information also adds a sprinkling of humour.

During testing, there was a steady stream of wild meatballs in the base game and free spins triggered at regular intervals, creating a feeling everything had been exceptionally well balanced. Never was there a moment when you'd forgotten what the features were because they were so few and far between, nor any hint of grind. Wild meatballs were as surprisingly helpful in boosting values as they were at linking reactions together when dropping rows following reactions. Despite knitting together some really nice win chains during the review, they were nothing compared to what Spicy Meatballs is capable of. Meatballs' bonus game can knock out wins of up to 55,210 times the stake, and the base game doesn't lag far behind at 52,600x the bet.

Spicy Meatballs is like one of those fancy stone-baked pizzas that cost a bit extra, yet you can see where the extra money went once you start gorging. And just how pretty much everyone likes pizza, it's hard to see many players flinging anything but positivity at Spicy Meatballs as well, due to BTG's consistently high standards in regards to excellent stats, gameplay, and rewards.