Big Bass Bonanza Megaways Slot

The Big Bass Bonanza slot became one of the most played games in Britain on the strength of one very simple loop, which is a man in a hat picking up fish. This is that loop running on a Megaways engine.

Reel Kingdom built it and Pragmatic Play publishes it, and the interesting question is whether the engine improves a game that was already working perfectly well without it.

Big Bass Bonanza Megaways Slot: the Basics

Six reels whose heights change every spin, giving a ways count that operators list in the tens of thousands rather than the fixed ten paylines of the original. The lake, the tackle box and the increasingly overworked fisherman are all where you left them.

The base game is the cost of admission and nothing else. It is quieter here than in the original, because a Megaways grid spends a lot of spins short and a short grid does not pay. Nobody has ever loaded this game for the base game.

The fisherman and the money fish

Here is the part that carries the entire series. Money symbols land carrying a cash value, but they do nothing on their own. They sit there. Then a fisherman lands, and he collects the value of every money symbol on the board at once.

Pragmatic states that money symbols in the bonus can be worth up to four thousand times your stake, which is also where the game’s ceiling comes from. One fisherman arriving on a board covered in fish is the whole game, and every session is really a wait for that specific frame.

The multipliers are what the Megaways version adds. Every fourth fisherman awards ten more free spins along with a rising multiplier, two times, then three times, and finally ten times. It stays for the rest of the round.

So the round has two clocks running at once. You are hoping for fish on the board, and you are counting fishermen towards the next upgrade, and a round that reaches the ten times stage is a categorically different animal from one that never gets past the first.

Getting into the bonus

Three, four, five or six scatters award ten, fifteen, twenty and twenty five free spins respectively. Retriggers come from the fisherman count rather than from landing more scatters, which is a neater arrangement than most.

What that means in practice is that a bad round ends quickly and a good round extends itself. The feature is self-selecting, and the difference between the two outcomes is far wider than in the original game.

RTP and volatility

Pragmatic quotes 96.70% as the standard configuration, which is high for the category, and as always the studio ships lower versions for operators to choose from. The information screen at your casino is the only authority on which one you are actually playing.

Volatility is a clear step up from the original, and this is the honest headline of the review. Every Megaways slot trades consistency for a longer tail, and doing that to a game whose appeal was its steady rhythm has a real cost.

Conclusion

This is a good conversion of a game that did not obviously need converting. The multiplier ladder is a genuine improvement on the original bonus and the base game is a genuine step down, and where you land on that depends on which half of the game you liked.

If the original is your comfort slot, be aware that this one will not behave like it. If you came up through Fishin Frenzy and the rest of the fishing genre, this is the most demanding version of that idea currently in wide circulation, and it is worth deciding what you are willing to spend before you find that out.

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