Bet365 Game Review: Bubble Craze

Every so often there comes along the game that breaks the mould. With the Jurassic Park slot, it was 3D parallax scrolling for example. However, with the Bubble Craze slot, playable right now on Bet365 Games, you are actually tearing up the definition of what a slot game actually is and breaking new ground with this bubble-popping extravaganza.

It is the brains at development company IGT that have produced the game which takes the slot premise of matching symbols and gives it an entirely new look, this time bubbles floating up from the bottom of the screen onto a hexagonal matrix, where you win by landing certain numbers of bubbles of matching colours sitting adjacent to each other.

Of course, there are some additional features which can help you in your quest to land the biggest win in the game, which we will look at in more detail below. The basics are that the hexagon consists of 19 bubbles arranged in rows of 3, 4, 5, 4 and 3 symbols and you need at least four bubbles of the same colour sitting adjacent to each other to trigger a win. The more bubbles of the same colour adjacent to each other, the bigger the win.  Different coloured bubbles offer different sized wins with silver bubbles being the highest value, offering a maximum payout of 10,000 coins.

Key Information

When you initially load up the Bubble Craze game, you will be forgiven for thinking that this is not a slot and has been mislabelled. However, when you start to play, it soon becomes evident that despite the radically different set up for the game, Bubble Craze does play and pay out very much as a slot game would. The aim of the game is to get four or more bubbles of the same colour touching each other on the 19 bubble hexagon, which is essentially the ‘reels’ for Bubble Craze.

There are eight different coloured bubbles which offer different value prizes depending on how many you land on the reel. The higher the number of same-coloured bubbles you land in a cluster, the greater the value of your payout for that colour.

The value of the bubbles starts off with the lowest paying brown and purple bubbles, then onto the green and blue bubbles which both offer slightly higher payouts. Yellow and orange bubbles offer the third level of payouts in the game with the red bubbles offering the second highest payouts and silver the greatest with a maximum win available if you turn all 19 bubbles silver, of 10,000 coins.

Playing the game could not be simpler. All you need to do is select your coin value for the game and you wager 50 times that coin value per spin. All your wins are calculated based on the single coin value.  Once you have selected your coin size, simply click the Spin button on the right of the screen to start the bubbles floating up into the hexagon.

To give you a better chance of success there are a number of feature bubbles which give you access to some additional features in the game. The first of these is the Bonus bubble, which if you can land three or more of these on a single spin, will see you receive 5 free spins as a reward.  This symbol is easy to recognise as it has a nuclear symbol inside it.

The second feature symbol is the Transform symbol which has a compass inside the bubble. This bubble is very useful as it will transform all the bubbles it touches into the same colour and can see you increase the value of a win markedly as it will always transform the bubbles into the colour that offers you the best possible win.

Lastly, the Multiplier symbol offers a multiplier on any wins that the bubble is part of. You can receive either a 2x or 5x multiplier on wins when the bubble is part of a winning cluster and they are easy to spot as they have the multiplier shown inside the bubble.

How to win playing Bubble Craze

The most important thing to remember when playing Bubble Craze with a view to earning a profit, is that effective bankroll management is key. You can increase and decrease the value of the coin value and it is more prudent to wager for more spins with a smaller value coin, than it is to play fewer spins for higher value coins.

That said, Bubble Craze is most definitely a medium to low variance game which means that wins are relatively frequent, although most base game wins are generally small. Some are less than your initial stake, while others are up to 10x more. As with all these types of games, the value of wins does vary greatly from sessions to session, but your bankroll will generally be topped up relatively frequently with smaller wins.

In order to land the bigger value wins in Bubble Craze however, you need to get lucky with the feature symbols. Of the three, I have found that the Transform symbol is the most regularly valuable as it can turn a small base game win, or a non-winning spin, into a winning one and tends to do this with frequency, often catching a Multiplier bubble within the selection of bubbles it transforms.

The Multiplier bubble is rather more hit and miss and you’ll likely see plenty of them on screen, but not too many will form part of a win on a spin.

The Free Spins bubble is the key however as during free spins, there appears to be (whether this is true or not I have not yet ascertained) more feature symbols on the reels. This means that during free spins it tends to be easier to turn more bubbles on a spin to the same colour and thus, you can hit some of the much bigger wins available in the game during the free spins round.

However, one caveat to that is that it is not particularly easy to hit free spins and you’ll often find you hit one or even two of the Free Spins bubbles on a spin, but not that elusive third one to trigger the bonus. Furthermore, big wins on the bonus are more likely, but not guaranteed, so sometimes you’ll walk away with a smaller win, but even so these tend to be greater than most base game wins.