When casting an eye over Pragmatic Play's considerable back catalogue, it quickly becomes apparent that the studio is broad-minded when it comes to choosing slot themes. One area the team has returned to on several occasions is Central American culture, with its many varied and colourful elements. Drilling down deeper into this rich culture, the studio has shown quite a fondness for spicy cooking ingredients, as seen in games like Chilli Heat and its more spicy follow-up Chilli Heat Megaways. Once again, Pragmatic Play fires up the stove as it heads to a heated region for the spicily themed online slot Hot Pepper.
To categorize it, Hot Pepper is a cluster paying grid slot, played on a 7x7 game grid set in a sandy desert location in one of the hotter, drier parts of the planet. A big wooden framed game grid is joined by desert plants, cacti, a lizard, rocky cliffs, and wide cloudy skies. You can almost feel the dust blowing in on the breeze. It might have felt a touch more lifeless than it does if not for the energetic soundtrack and the happy sombrero-wearing chap on the reels. Pragmatic Play has located several similarly themed slots in a town, so the change of setting goes hand in hand with a changeup in gaming mechanics.
>To start sampling some of the chilli goodness, players pick a stake starting at 20 p/c going up to $/€100 per paid game round. Any device can be used to play a game that comes with two possible RTP settings; 96.45% or the lower value version of 95.02%. On the higher RTP version, the return value increases a notch or two to 96.79% when buying free spins, while the volatility, rated 5 out of 5, is high.
Hitting the play button drops 49 symbols onto the panel, creating a winning cluster when at least five matching symbols land adjacent to each other in vertical or horizontal positions. Seven pay symbol types appear, from low to high they are clubs, hearts, spades, limes, tacos, piñatas, and the happy chap in the hat. Five symbol clusters pay 0.1 to 1 times the bet, whereas the largest clusters, continuing 15+ matching symbols, award 10 to 50 times the stake. Other symbols are the wilds and the scatter symbols, discussed next.
>Step one in grasping how Hot Pepper functions is its tumble wins mechanism. When a winning cluster hits, the symbols that formed it explode from the game board. The gaps are filled by symbols falling down from above; in addition, a chilli symbol is placed in one of the empty spaces as part of the Random Wild Multiplier feature.
Chilli symbols are wild, so they substitute for all other symbols except the scatter. A random level from 1 to 5 is selected as well. This level determines what sort of multiplier the chilli wilds will have. Then, for every 3 wilds used in a tumble sequence on the same spin, the level increases, up to level 5 at most. Levels and their values follow this progression:
Multipliers are applied to any win the wild is part of, and if more than one wild is part of a cluster, the values are added to each other first. In the base game, level progress is reset at the end of the spin.
Landing 3 scatter symbols in a tumble sequence awards 12 free spins. In free spins, wilds generated by cluster wins are always at level 5 for the full duration of the bonus round. The round can be extended by +5 free spins when 3 scatter symbols hit in a tumble sequence. Finally, where available, users may buy free spins for a cost equal to 100 times the total bet.
>On the Scoville Scale, the meter measuring the pungency of a chilli pepper, you'd imagine Hot Pepper would get a fairly decent score. It's not the wildest grid slot out there, but Hot Pepper's got a few tricks it can use to heat the proverbial taste buds. The theme's execution adds verve, too, and whilst Hot Pepper is fairly basic, though not in an overly bad way, it's got the sort of components which can technically knit together to fire off an entertaining run of events.
Like heroically shovelling down a pepper that scored high on the Scoville Scale, for the lols or whatever, there is a chance Hot Pepper may bite back. At times during testing, it could be hard to gain much traction, either in the bonus round or out of it. One of the possible reasons is you kind of have to win at least two times in a row to really get anywhere. The first time to plant the wild multiplier, the second to put it to use somewhere, if possible. All part of the high volatility then, as some tumble sequences fizzle out, others linger like an oesophagus set on fire by an overly hot pepper. It's a game which can get tantalisingly close by, say, dropping an x128 or two, then pulling away by not dropping anything useful near it. There is a flip side, of course, where symbols land just to produce something decent, theoretically all the way up to 10,000x the bet, which is Hot Pepper's win cap.
If you've played Fruit Party 2, then Hot Pepper's gameplay may come across as rather similar, and the games feel quite closely related. Despite its busy schedule, or because of it, Pragmatic Play is good at coming up with a decent idea, throwing in a pretty scene, and sending it out into the wild. This approach might not lead to mind-warpingly original experiences, but in the case of Hot Pepper, at least, it can lead to a pleasing game with more merits than flaws.
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