Get ready to down tequilas and bust piñatas at Pragmatic Play's Mexican-themed street party Hot Fiesta. With a name like that, you'd expect a slot to raise the roof to produce all sorts of fiery entertainment. Unfortunately, the rest of the game fails to follow through, and while Hot Fiestas has the technical capabilities to dish up big wins, its emotion-free generic nature makes it hard to fall for.
Confetti rains down on a non-descript 5-reel, 25-payline grid set amidst brightly painted buildings in some warm, exotic destination. Just about every Mexican cliché appears in this game that, unfortunately, lacks both finesse and charm. Hot Fiesta's saving grace from an audio-visual standpoint is a foot-tapping groove to dance along to or maybe break out in a cha-cha or just bob around depending on your confidence and ability to bust a move.
The 5,000x win cap here isn't as exotic as the theme, but the remaining stats are quite decent. The default RTP, for example, when betting without the Ante Bet feature engaged is 96.56%, while high volatility means the game can go off like a firecracker or fizzle if the fuse blows out. Remember though, Pragmatic Play RTP is flexible, so depending on the casino you're playing on, this number can be significantly lower. Getting all fiestery is possible on any device where base bets of 25 p/c to $/€125 per spin are available.
Moseying through Hot Fiesta's paytable, we find 11 regular pay symbols divided into low pay 10 to A card royals, and 6 premium tiles. These are cocktails, maracas, guitars, accordions, a señorita, and a señor. Hit a 5 of a kind win of high pay symbols rewards you with a prize worth 4 to 30 times your stake.
A purple piñata is wild, appearing on all reels to substitute for any symbol except the bonus symbol. Wilds display a random multiplier of x2, x3, or x5 which is applied to the prize value of any winning combinations they are a part of. If there is more than one wild in a win, the values are added together before being applied.
Symbols displaying a trio of fireworks are the scatters landing on reels 1, 3, and 5. Hitting 3 at once triggers the free spins feature plus a win of 3x the bet. Before the round starts, a grid of 3x3 piñatas explodes one by one, each revealing a different number which is tallied up to award 9 to 27 free spins.
During the free spins round, all wild symbols that hit remain on the screen for the feature's full duration. In between spins, these wilds shift to a new position on the board. Each sticky roaming wild has a random multiplier of x2, x3, or x5, boosting any winning combination they are involved with. Bonus symbols are not present during free spins, so the feature cannot be retriggered.
Hot Fiesta doesn't come with a feature buy option, but it has something similar called the Ante Bet. By increasing each paid spin cost by 40%, players double their chances of landing 3 scatters, thereby triggering free spins. When Ante Bet is active, it decreases the RTP slightly to 96.53%.
Well, it's kind of hot, sort of fiestery, yet Hot Fiesta isn't a game that feels like much love or sweat went into it. It's almost as if Pragmatic Play wasn't in the mood to party. The music manages to keep the game alive for a while, though if you fail to hit something decent quickly, it will be hard to stay motivated. Hot Fiesta ticks the boxes, and there's nothing awful about it, but there's just too little to get excited about as well. What you get on screen is a stock physical-ish-looking reel set up, surrounded by formulaic Mexicana. It creates the impression of a studio not trying very hard to impress.
The same can be said for the gameplay. Hot Fiesta remains stuck in low gear a lot of the time and struggles to get the party going. The occasional wild multiplier in the base game provides the odd thrill or two now and then. Free spins step it up due to sticky roaming wilds, which multiply and can pound out satisfactory wins. So much so that Pragmatic Play has limited the amount you can win in free spins to 5,000 times the bet. Interestingly, having faced backlash in the community due to their overexaggerated numbers which never seemed to come into realisation, the studio has done this in a number of slots around the time of writing and appears to be their go-to potential figure for now.
Technically, you can't fault Hot Fiesta, yet its glaring lack of passion significantly reduces the fun factor. It also means Hot Fiesta can't compete with bigger, better, more interesting Mexican slots like Extra Chilli Megaways, Esqueleto Explosivo 2 or later releases like Wild Chapo or Wild Luchador, to mention just a few.
In the end, Hot Fiesta is like one of those parties you feel obligated to go to, then have one or two drinks before ducking out early to go home and watch telly. It's okay for a while, but any longer would be tiresome, especially when you know better fiestas are happening on the other side of town.
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