Ooh, ladybugs, how adorable, these charming wee residents of the garden have been honoured by developer Pragmatic Play in an online slot all of their own titled Ladybug Luck. Then again, they're not getting too much honour since Ladybug Luck is a clone of another one of Pragmatic Play's slots, Wild Hop & Drop, which is made even more amusing since it borrowed ideas from Push Gaming's Fat Rabbit. And round and round go the swirling set of ideas that emerge, reemerge, form, and reform in the online gambling sphere. Ah well, if you're going to copy someone else's idea, you might as well pick a good one, so for some growing, roaming wild action in free spins with a cute beetle character, away we go…
Like Wild Hop & Drop, Ladybug Luck is a brightly presented game that takes place out in nature, where green colours dominate, and what looks like a Smurf mushroom house sits to one side of the screen. On the opposite side, a golden ladybug helps express the game's theme, holding a flower parasol while flapping her wings and hovering around. The music is just as merry as the visuals, maybe more so, meaning Ladybug Luck's out-of-doors atmosphere is about as chipper as it gets.
Being a reskin, Ladybug Luck possesses a recycled set of facts and figures, such as a default RTP of 96.46% and volatility rated high (5 out of 5). Bets of 20 p/c to $/€100 can be selected, and free spins can be bought for the cost of 100 times the bet. When buying free spins, the return value increases slightly to 96.47%. Hitting the spin button drops symbols onto a 6x6 gaming board, which creates wins when clusters of 6 or more identical symbols land next to each other horizontally or vertically connected.
Dotty J to A card ranks make up Ladybug Luck's lower pays, while a trio of ladybug characters make up the 3 high pays. For rewards, players get 0.5 to 4 times the bet for landing a 6-of-a-kind winning cluster, rising up to 20 to 200 times the bet for hitting a 26+ sized cluster. Wilds are able to replace any regular pay symbols to help create clusters. In the base game, wilds can land as 1x1, 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 5x5, or 6x6 sized symbols. If the wild lands as a 6x6 sized symbol in the base game, it pays out 5,000x the bet.
Apart from randomly sized wild symbols, Ladybug Luck's base game has nothing extra to offer. It does have a free spins round, though, triggered when at least 4 bonus symbols land on the grid.
Hitting 4 or more scatter symbols in the base game awards 6 free spins. Free spins begin with a 1x1 wild symbol which remains on the grid until the feature ends. On each free spin, the wild moves to a random position. When scatter symbols land, they are collected as part of the progressive feature. For every 4th scatter symbol collected, 1-3 free spins are awarded and the roaming wild symbol increases in size, progressively from 1x1 to 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 5x5, and 6x6. At the last wild level, +1 free spin is added. After the fourth progression, no more retriggers may occur. Also, if the feature was triggered with 5 scatter symbols, the round starts with 1 scatter already collected, or if it was triggered by 6 scatter symbols, then the round starts with 2 scatter symbols already collected.
When buying free spins, 4, 5, or 6 scatter symbols will randomly land to trigger the round.
If Wild Hop & Drop was an unoriginal slot, then Ladybug Luck takes the perception of withered creativity to the next level. That's harsh, and no doubt Pragmatic Play had a purpose in mind when Ladybug Luck was made. And to be fair, it is quite a fun game. Well, the bonus round can be exciting. Ladybug Luck's base game, on the other hand, could be dull, steamrolling through dead spins, wallowing in an uneventful torpor. With no extra modifiers or cascading wins, it's up to the randomly sized wild and larger regular cluster wins to provide the chuckles. Should the 6x6 wild hit, then the chuckles will likely be long and deep indeed.
Probably not likely to see the 6x6 in the base game too much, though, so that leaves Ladybug Luck's bonus round to step the game up. Like Fat Rabbit and its follow-ups and imitators have done for a while now, the growing roaming wild symbol can be a real thrill ride. Obviously, the bigger, the better, theoretically increasing the likelihood of pulling together larger clusters as the ladybug wild bounds about the place. Like the base game, the biggest payout possible in free spins is 5,000x the bet, which is when Ladybug Luck's win cap steps in to end the ride.
Obviously, Ladybug Luck isn't the most originally thought-through game out there. Actually, it's pretty much devoid of any new ideas unless you count the ladybug inclusion aspect. Not that Pragmatic Play was likely to have been trying hard to be wildly original when it designed the game. Like Wild Hop & Drop, Ladybug Luck is capable of dealing out exciting moments, but it struggles to throw off a pervasive imitative copycat feeling.
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