Big Bass Bonazna Hold & Spinner (Pragmatic Play) Slot Demo & Review

You can’t blame any slot developer – or other entertainment media provider, for that matter – for trying to make the most of their successful franchises. After all, games such as Big Bass Bonanza, Big Bass Bonanza Megaways, and Bigger Bass Bonanza must all have been at least relatively popular for Pragmatic Play to continue creating new variants of the game at the rate that they have. What does bother me a little, though, is just how similar some of these games are – the assets are almost always recycled, meaning you get the same symbols, the same backdrops, and the same music and sound effects. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to tell many of these games apart if you covered up the logo displayed above the reels! This time around, though, at least Big Bass Bonanza Hold & Spinners offers an extra bonus round and a bigger jackpot to differentiate it from its predecessors.

Big jackpots have to be paid for, of course, and this is apparent when you look at the prizes offered on the paytable of Hold & Spin – they are only a little lower than those featured on the original Big Bass Bonanza paytable, but it’s a noticeable drop all the same. The most valuable symbol is the Spinner, paying 200x the total bet for a full payline of five of a kind, whilst the Fishing Rod is worth half as much at 100x for all five symbols. The Dragonfly and Tackle Box will both pay you 50x your total bet for a complete payline, whilst a combination of any five Fish Money Symbols will pay you 20x the total stake – assuming the fisherman does not show up to collect their labelled values! The low-paying symbols are divided into two groups, with the Ace/King paying 10x each and the Queen/Jack/Ten half as much at 5x for a five of a kind combination.

Pragmatic Play’s usual three-way bet selection system is included as usual, with individual options for controlling the coins per line, coin value, and total bet. These allow you to choose any multiple of the minimum €0.10 bet up to the maximum of €100.00 per spin. If the ante bet option is enabled, these figures increase by 50%.

The base game of Big Bass Bonanza: Hold & Spinner uses a typical five reel, three-row layout, but wins occur relatively infrequently as a result of there being just ten active paylines. This can be both a blessing and a curse, of course; on the one hand, fewer paylines do mean you will win much less often. However, on the other, those wins will be substantially larger than they would be in a game with more paylines.

Ante Bet

If your bankroll permits, I would always recommend playing this game with the ante bet option enabled. This costs an additional 50% per spin but doubles the chances of triggering a bonus round in return. There’s also a minimal increase in the game’s RTP when the ante bet option is activated.

Unlike many previous games in this franchise, Hold & Spinner includes two main bonus rounds. The Hold & Spinner feature is triggered by hitting three money symbols during a base game spin, whilst the regular free spins are activated by hitting three or more scatter symbols instead.

Hold & Spinner Bonus

Whenever three or more money symbols appear during a single spin, the Hold & Spinner bonus feature is triggered. At the start of the feature, the money symbols will become sticky, whilst all other reel positions will be cleared of their existing symbols.

In this mode, the regular reels are replaced by new ones that feature only additional money symbols. You start the bonus with three spins, and hitting a money symbol will restore your spin counter to the initial total of three. The feature will end if three consecutive spins play out without additional money symbols being added to the reels.

Each money symbol can be worth up to 2,000x the total bet, and with 15 available positions, it is definitely possible to hit the game’s maximum jackpot of 10,000x the total stake during this bonus round.

Free Spins

Hitting three scatter symbols will award 10 free spins, whilst four or five scatters increase this to either 15 or 20 free spins, respectively. During the free spins feature, the fisherman is wild and will collect the value of all fish money symbols visible on any spin where he appears.

Fisherman symbols are also collected in the meter displayed above the reel set. For every fourth wild collected, a re-trigger is awarded, which means 10 additional spins are added to your remaining total, and the current round multiplier will be increased. The maximum available multiplier of 10x is awarded after collecting 12 wild fishermen.

Bonus Buy

Both the Hold & Spinner and Free Spins features are available to be purchased in this game at the cost of 100x the normal price per spin. It’s nice that Pragmatic Play has managed to keep the cost of both features the same – the only issue is that these options are not available in some countries and jurisdictions.