Developer Pragmatic Play has put on a Santa outfit and come up with a slot for the Christmas season going by the name of Sugar Rush Xmas. Just as the studio has dressed up (maybe, probably not) for the occasion, so is Sugar Rush Xmas a dressed-up reskinned version of the mega popular cluster-paying slot Sugar Rush. For the Xmas conversion, Pragmatic Play has left pretty much everything mechanical as it is, meaning a seasonal dose of cluster paying, rising multiplier spot action is in store for willing participants.
Where Sugar Rush was held in a candy wonderland, Sugar Rush Xmas shifts focus to a snowy, Xmas-related one. Fortunately, candy is popular around Christmas day (when isn't it?), so the game slips effortlessly into its new role. Not much else to say than that. Gummy bears smear themselves over the reels, and the excellent '70s game show music was just as jazzy on the Sugar Rush Xmas demo as it was in the original game.
>One thing that's changed is the upper limits of the betting range. Now, when selecting bets, players can go as low as 20 c or as high as $/€240 per spin. Other numbers have stayed the same, such as the 96.5% RTP - whether buying free spins or not, and the volatility is still high, rated 5 out of 5. As before, hitting spin drops 49 symbols into a 7x7 gaming grid.
After winning combinations have appeared and paid, the symbols involved in them are removed from the reels. Remaining as well as new symbols tumble down to close up the empty spaces. If a new win appears after a tumble, the mechanic is repeated until no new win lands on the grid. As a cluster paying slot, winning combinations are created when 5 or more identical symbols are connected to each other in horizontal or vertical directions. Wins are removed by the tumble feature. For landing a 5-symbol cluster, the rewards are 0.2 to 1 times the bet, going as high as 20 to 150 times the bet for a 15+ sized cluster. Sugar Rush Xmas has 7 different pay symbols, represented as various types of candy, though it does not have a wild symbol.
>The features in Sugar Rush Xmas are the same as before, so multiplier spots, free spins, and a bonus buy option.
Whenever a winning symbol is removed, it highlights its position on the grid. The second time a symbol is removed from the same spot, a multiplier of x2 is added to it, doubling in value every time another symbol is removed from the same spot – up to a maximum of x128. The multiplier applies to all winning combinations that land on top of it. If more than one multiplier is involved in the same win, they are added to each other. In the base game, marked spots with multipliers are cleared at the end of the spin when there are no more tumbles.
Landing 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 scatters anywhere on the reels in the base game awards players with 10, 12, 15, 20, or 30 free spins, respectively. While free spins are active, highlighted spots and their multipliers remain in place until the round ends. In other words, they are not cleared at the end of a free spin as they are in the base game. During the round, free spins can be retriggered in the exact same way they are triggered.
For 100x the bet total bet, players can buy the free spins round. When buying free spins, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 scatters randomly hit to trigger it.
>Just as Pragmatic Play is a master of flinging phenomenal amounts of material at a wall to see what sticks, the studio is also adroit at taking what worked and recycling it through the wringer. Sugar Rush, for example, was a slot that found notoriety and went on to form the basis for a number of subsequent releases. Examples include Mochimon, Yi Sun Shin, Guarana Eyes of the Amazon, and now Sugar Rush Xmas - so far. Some of those slots have matched the core gameplay with some pretty niche topics, but unless you're totally into baby-level Digimons, googly-eyed plants, or Korean naval history, there is no compelling reason for picking any one of them over the original Sugar Rush slot, since beneath the surface, lies the same stats, figures, and features.
So it is with Sugar Rush Xmas, which is a more obvious reskin than the other three mentioned slots. Not that the skin hugely matters in these games, taking a back seat to marking as many positions as possible in an attempt to roll through multiplier values. A taste of this can happen in the base game, which is a warm-up event to free spins where marked multiplier positions persist till the round ends. As always, watching clusters of symbols drop-down/form up on multipliers is a major highlight, not just for the wins this produces but to increase respective multipliers for possible future use. Sugar Rush has hit its win cap in the past, so the 5,000x the bet top prize is a realistic one.
You'd hope so, too, what with all of the multipliers that can end up on the reels, adding to each other when combined in a win. Sugar Rush Xmas does feel like low-hanging fruit, many Xmas reskins do, but it's hard to feel too down over much of it other than the lack of imagination and relative effort that likely went into its construction.
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