Love is in the air for the cast of Candy Street in Sugar Rush Valentine’s Day – an even more syrupy version of the already super sweet slot series from the team at Octopus Gaming.
Using the same basic game mechanics as the original Sugar Rush and its Summer Time counterpart, Sugar Rush Valentine’s Day is again a 5 reel, 20 payline slot featuring stacked wilds, free spins and a bonus feature, but this time love hearts and a pink and red theme are the order of the day.
Unlike Sugar Rush Summer Time, whose return to player stats we had some issue with during our play-through, the Valentine’s Day version seems more in keeping with the original game, meaning both the bonus round and free spins are activated fairly frequently to help increase your profits.
Building on the same winning formula that is present in the other titles in the Sugar Rush series, the Valentine’s Day edition is again a fixed 20 payline game, meaning players need only set the amount they wish to bet each spin in order to get started. Anywhere between 1 and 10 coins can be wagered per line, with coin sizes varying from $0.01 to $0.50 to provide a great range of betting options.
At the high end, this means the game can be played for a maximum of $100 per spin (i.e. $5 per line), with payouts starting from 5x your line bet for matching three of the ubiquitous playing card symbols. This amount rises steadily once you get to the game’s unique icons – especially when you’re lucky enough to land five-of-a-kind – and the maximum jackpot is 450x your stake per line.
Although conforming to the standard Sugar Rush aesthetic, a couple of graphical tweaks have been made to Sugar Rush Valentine’s Day to make the game feel fresh and new. The first is the background, which no longer depicts the familiar pastel hues of Candy Street, but rather the pink and red interior of a candle and chocolate-filled boudoir.
The second difference is in the regular icons themselves, which now feature marshmallow hearts and red gummy stars to keep the game’s Valentine’s Day theme consistent. Unfortunately, the ace-through-queen symbols still remain and are a bit of an eyesore, but this is somewhat compensated for by the presence of a new hearts scatter symbol and a love-struck gingerbread man as the wild.
Disappointingly, both the game’s music and sound effects remain identical to the original Sugar Rush which, while not in itself a bad thing, feels like a bit of a missed opportunity given that a few harp chords here and there or the twanging of Cupid’s bow would have really improved the experience.
Fans of the Sugar Rush series will be pleased to know that the original game’s main feature, a tower building bonus round, again returns in the Valentine’s Day edition. Activated whenever three heart-topped cupcakes appear anywhere on a valid payline, players are temporarily removed from the gameboard and taken to an all new screen, where they must construct a tower of tasty treats.
With different snacks drifting along the top of the screen, players must select one to form each layer of their tower, with each item awarding a different prize amount. These amounts are totted up to give you your total bonus prize at the end of the round, which either occurs when your tower has been completed or two “bad” sections have been added to the structure, which ends the feature.
Also making a welcome reappearance in Sugar Rush Valentine’s Day is a free spin feature that is triggered whenever three or more hearts scatter symbols appear anywhere on the 5 reels. Awarding 10, 15 or 20 free spins, this bonus seems to pay out far more frequently than in the Summer Time version of the game, with the stacked gingerbread wilds often completing big prize combinations.
While not exactly a groundbreaking remake, Sugar Rush Valentine’s Day is a suitably cute seasonal edition of the game that will have fans of the series falling in love all over again. The same great features that made the original such a success are all present, while the graphical makeover does just about enough to distance the game from its predecessor and keep existing players interested.
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