Big Bass Bonanza (Pragmatic Play) Slot Demo & Review

Avid slots players will probably already be aware that Big Bass Bonanza was created to compete with the hugely popular Fishin’ Frenzy games published by Blueprint; Indeed, take away the title screens and logos, and you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two games. Both franchises have been massively successful for their respective developers, leading to a myriad of sequels and further fishing-based games such as The Rodfather Megaways and Bass Boss, amongst others. All of these games are good fun, and many of them offer diverse feature sets and reasonable jackpots; my only question would be, who is playing them? Is fishing really that popular nowadays? It all seems a little bit strange to me!

The Spinners are the most valuable items on the paytable of Big Bass Bonanza and are worth a respectable 200x the current stake for a full payline of five of a kind. The Fishing Rod has a payout of 100x for all five symbols, whilst the Large Fly, presumably a type of bait, and the Tackle Box share equal returns of 50x for a complete payline. The Fish Symbols that appear in large stacks take the last high-paying spot, paying 20x the total bet for a five of a kind combination; the cash prizes printed on these symbols are irrelevant during the base game, which I’ve always found frustrating! That just leaves the five royal symbols, the Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and Ten, all of which share equal payouts of 10x the total bet for all five symbols.

As for the betting range, this is something which Pragmatic Play always gets right – there are minimum/maximum limits of €0.10 and €100.00 per spin, respectively, and you can also choose from a multitude of betting options within this range, making the game accessible to players of all sized budgets.

There isn’t much to talk about regarding the base game of Big Bass Bonanza. As mentioned in the opening paragraphs, all of the special features of this machine are tied up in the bonus round. The reels are arranged in a standard 5×3 configuration spanned by just ten fixed paylines. Whilst this means you won’t win as often as you might on a machine with more lines or payways, the prizes you hit will likely be valuable.

Fish Money Symbols

Fish symbols are ‘money’ symbols in this game and take on a random value of either 2x, 5x, 10x, 15x, 20x, 25x, 50x, or 2,000x the total bet during each round. Unfortunately, collecting these amounts during the base game is impossible. For that, you’ll need to trigger a bonus round first.

Bonus scatter symbols are present on all five reels in this game, but you’ll only need to land three of them to activate the free spins feature. A three-scatter trigger will award ten free spins, increasing to 15 or 20 for four or five scatter symbols, respectively.

Free Spins

A new fisherman wild symbol is added to the reels in this mode. This guy is not only holding an impressively-sized fish, but he’s also the key to winning this game’s jackpot! Whenever the fisherman appears simultaneously with one or more fish money symbols, he will collect the cash values displayed on them – the fish symbols do not need to be on a pay line for this to occur.

Every wild symbol that lands during the free spins feature will also be collected in the progress bar displayed directly above the playfield. After collecting four wilds, the feature will be re-triggered, and a new 2x multiplier will be applied to future wins. Collecting another four wilds will increase your multiplier to 3x as well as topping up your spin counter with an extra 10 rounds; collect yet another set of four wilds, and you’ll make it to the final stage where a mammoth 10x multiplier awaits!