In the early days of film, actor Tom Mix appeared in 291 movies from 1909 to 1935, with all but nine of them being silent. He was known as the 'King of the Cowboys' and was one of Hollywood's first Western stars. It's said Mix helped define the genre, so he probably knew a thing or two about recreating The West in popular culture. In his words, 'The Old West is not a certain place in a certain time, it's a state of mind; it's whatever you want it to be.' That should be music to the ears of software providers since the Wild West is on heavy rotation in the iGaming world. Mining is one of the more popular slot subjects as well and Pragmatic Play has combined elements of both topics to make a game called Bomb Bonanza.
One apparently critical element in any mining themed slot is the prospector who leads players on their escapades down mines to look for rich stuff. Not all mining slots have them, but a lot do, maybe even most, and in Bomb Bonanza, a prospector stands on the right side of the 5x5 game grid casually holding dynamite in one hand and a lighter in the other. On the left side of the grid is a box of more dynamite, while the background is made up of the classic wood structured town, the type of which seems ubiquitous in the Wild West of yore.
If you like to play slots oozing colossal levels of winning potential, Bomb Bonanza is unlikely to be hugely enticing. However, the rest of the numbers form a respectable set of stats, the likes of which Pragmatic Play games typically come with. This means a max RTP value of 96.46%, though it may be found at 95.5% or 94.5%, while volatility remains high (5 out of 5). Any device may be used to get your mine on, where bets of 25 p/c to $/€125 per spin can be selected.
Crossing the 5-reel, 5-row game panel are 50 fixed paylines for landing winning combinations on, starting with J-A card royals, worth 2-3x for five of a kind. Up from them are pickaxes, pans, sacks of gold, and the prospector, paying out 6 to 12 times your stake for landing a five of a kind win. Bombs are central to the action and represent the game's wild symbol, leaving the scatter as the final symbol.
Bombs are wild, so they can substitute any regular pay symbols to help complete winning lines. In the base game, when a wild symbol hits, there is a chance it expands to cover more positions on the reels. Expanding wilds can be 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 or 5x5 in size. Wilds spread by moving in any of the four main directions (up, down, left, or right), so they may expand off the grid.
That leaves scatter symbols which land on reels 1, 3, or 5. When all 3 scatters are in view, players win 6 free spins. A couple of things change in the bonus round, including moving the action into a mine. The other change is that nugget symbols can appear on the reels. When nuggets hit, they are collected on a meter located at the top right of the reels. Collected nuggets explode, and symbols cascade into the gaps. By collecting nuggets, players can move up levels to guarantee the size of spreading wilds, like so:
When starting the bonus round on Level 1, wilds remain at 1x1 in size until you move to the higher levels, where wilds spread to their stated size.
Pragmatic Play certainly like their 'Bonanzas', and Bomb Bonanza is another one with the emotive word in its title. It can live up to its name, during free spins mainly, where some tantalising spreading wild action can take place. Adding another Western/Mining themed game to an already lengthy list might not be a newsworthy event, but Pragmatic Play has made a nicely playable addition all the same. On a surface level, the studio has done this by injecting Bomb Bonanza with the type of bright-looking, enthusiastic attitude Pragmatic Play excels at.
So the theme, if a little hackneyed, has been positively dealt with, and the same goes for the features. They're hardly super innovative, and there's not a lot to them, yet the spreading wild effect has its moments - even in the base game, though, it's during free spins where they're more likely to take off. One thing to keep in mind is that spreading wilds can move off the grid. So, making level 5 and getting the 5x5 wild doesn't mean it will cover the grid like it's guaranteed to do so in games like Fat Rabbit. Perhaps this is partly why Bomb Bonanza has a fairly average max win figure of 2,000x the stake.
As mentioned, mining themed slots abound, as do Westerns, so a game has to do something extraordinary to stand out. Studios such as Big Time Gaming and Blueprint Gaming are two of the reigning champs in his arena thanks to stunners like Bonanza Megaways, Gold Strike Bonanza, or Diamond Mine Megaways, bringing it like few other slots are capable of. By comparison, Bomb Bonanza doesn't do anything remarkable enough to make it 'King of the Cowboys' to borrow Tom Mix's title to make a point, but it combines a warm prospecting charm with features that are explosive enough to make it a good pick for the right player.
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