Hot Zone Wild
iSoftBet’s Hot Zone Wild online slot is geared around having a larger than usual layout for lots of extra room for wilds to land. With free spins, wild reel multipliers and other ways to land extra payouts, this is a high-action game made especially for players who love lots of ways to win over everything else.
Casinos with Hot Zone Wild
- Hot Zone Wild
An Introduction to the Hot Zone Wild Slot
The first mechanical slots often used fruit-based themes. At the time, this is because the prizes would be different flavors of chewing gum. However, the motif has stuck very much to the point that we have a whole sub-genre full of modern slots like Neon Light Fruits.
Additionally, the Hot Zone Wild video slot from iSoftBet fits in this sub-genre. At the same time, it seeks to redefine it from a gameplay perspective.
When it comes to the look of this game, it’s not designed to be over-complicated. You have a bright sunburst type of blue and purple animation coming from behind the reels. However, on the reels themselves, the background is a sort of woven set of purple and red hexagons showing the different parts of the play area. Most of the paying symbols consist of fruit symbols, which look amazing, and bright and bold card ranks.
While the presentation is fine for what it is, it clearly wasn’t iSoftBet’s focus when creating this game. Instead, that focus is on the gameplay elements. Everything from the way the layout is set up to the balance of the pay table is taken into account with this. Additionally, every aspect of the gameplay and features tie together into each other. The result is a particularly high hit-rate game with a lot of ways to run up larger wins from the regular payouts. However, a strong bonus feature playing on these themes is also available.
Betting and Layout
The format that’s used here isn’t super common, but it’s not exactly rare either. You may or may not have seen other games that use it before. However, if you’ve played 243 ways games before, it’s not far off from that. Nonetheless, this format is an important part of how the features work, so it’s worth really understanding. Here’s what you can expect from it:
- Something most players will notice right away is that the game is “longer” from left to right than most. That’s because it has twice the length as the height with six reels and three rows.
- Additionally, this slot uses the “all ways” approach when awarding your wins. As a result, you have 729 ways to win on each spin of this game.
- What this means is that a matching symbol anywhere on the reel, for consecutive reels, will award a win.
- However, these reels have to be aligned starting from the first one on the left and going toward the right.
- Betting is set up from what amounts to a simple list of a number of options. The range goes from €0.20 per turn at the minimum to €20 per spin at a maximum.
- You’ll notice that the betting breaks each value down to a coin amount as well. However, you can actually ignore these coin values since they don’t come into play at all in this game.
Other Information
The volatility of a game like this can be tricky to assess if you’re not familiar with them. We place it at a bit above the average. While this can seem anti-intuitive due to the higher hit-rate than usual, we have a good reason for it. The main bonus round with the free spins packs opportunities for some massive multipliers. Additionally, this pools up a lot of value into this one feature, which draws the volatility upward.
Even though most iSoftBet slots, including this one, show a coin value when choosing your bet size, it doesn’t have any bearing on anything in this game. In fact, the wins are all just based on how much you’re betting in total anyway. That’s how we’ll describe each win we look at in the following as well.
Gameplay and Features for the Hot Zone Wild Video Slot
The Hot Zone Wild online slot is similar to the Diamond Blitz 40 game in terms of the theme and focus on gameplay. However, the main difference is the format and arrangement of the game mechanics. Virtually everything about this title is all about getting more wins and higher multipliers of wins from the normal pay table. As such, the value is in the format as much as it’s in the various mechanics and features.
Wild Symbols in the Hot Zone
Players will notice that the middle four reels of this game are a bit of a different color than the rest. That’s because those middle four reels are what’s known as the “Hot Zone” in this slot. Additionally, this Hot Zone is the only area of the game board where wilds can appear.
This slot actually has two types of wilds. However, only the regular wilds can appear in the normal game mode. Special multiplier wilds will be discussed further down when looking at the free spins bonus round.
What you need to know about the wilds here is straightforward. Since they cannot appear on the first and last reels, they don’t make winning combinations on their own. That aside, they do help with a lot of additional wins within this type of format. Additionally, they can’t substitute for the bonus scatter symbol. However, they do substitute for all of the fruit and card rank symbols, as well as the diamonds, which include all of the other symbols in the game.
Hot Zone Wild Free Spins
The other special symbol this game offers is a round red circle. It says “BONUS GAME” across it in golden letters, and it’s the scattered bonus symbol. Additionally, this symbol can only appear in the Hot Zone as well. What’s also noteworthy is that you can only land one on a reel at a time. That means a maximum of four of them are available at a time. Likewise, three or more will trigger free spins with the following amounts:
- Three Scatters – 6 free spins
- Four Scatters – 8 free spins
That difference of two more free spins may not seem like a lot. However, with how the wild multipliers work in this feature, you’ll quickly understand that it’s a world of difference in value.
Free Spin Wild Reel Multipliers
The wild multipliers here do not work like you’d typically expect. Instead, they act as multipliers for the reel itself for the remainder of the feature. That’s why we made such a big deal about getting two additional free turns for the extra scatter.
When a multiplier wild lands, it increases the multiplier for every symbol that lands on that reel for the remainder of the feature.
Additionally, that specific multiplier can no longer land on that reel. If you get a larger multiplier than the one that’s already landed, it will take the place of the previous one. Since you could end up with 10x multipliers across each individual reel, that’s the maximum per reel. However, getting 10x multipliers on all four reels that make up the Hot Zone would give a potential overall multiplier of 10,000x.
Now you can clearly see where the volatility increase comes from. These multipliers allow for some absolutely amazing payouts. Additionally, these are the most likely to come at the tail-end of the free spins bonus round of the Hot Zone Wild video slot.
How to Win at Hot Zone Wild
For all practical purposes, the gameplay of this title is based around a simple concept. Most players, most of the time, will be shooting for the free spins bonus feature. However, since longevity is the name of the game when feature hunting, the higher than average volatility can become an issue.
Any betting adjustment is obviously up to the player. However, we recommend lowering your bet size a bit down by around 33 percent or so. This will take enough of the volatility away to smooth things out with respect to the starting wager. It also keeps things interesting enough by not lowering the bet size by more than necessary to smooth things out a bit.
Payout Structure of the Hot Zone Wild Online Slot
The diamond is the top-paying symbol on the pay table overall. Six of a kind will land you a solid 25x win. Next up is the bell, which comes in at 10x for six of a kind combinations. Getting into the fruit starts with the watermelon and lemon with 7.5x and 6x for six of each, respectively. Additionally, the lowest level fruit symbol is the cherry, and six of it grants you a 5x payout.
Four bright and bold card rank royal symbols round off the lower end of the pay table. You can land 1.5x for six of the red A or 1x for six of the blue K. However, things drop slightly to 0.9x for six of a kind of the green Q. Finally, six of the orange J symbols score a 0.75x win.
Overview
While reviewing the Hot Zone Wild slot, we were reminded quite a few times of the Wilds of Fortune game. A lot of the gameplay elements are somewhat related, so that may be another option for players to check out if they really like this game.
That aside, we really enjoyed what iSoftBet did with this throwback-inspired video slot. The classic slot symbols look like they belong in a modern game, so the presentation is definitely strong enough to hold up with what players are into today. However, the gameplay is what really caught our attention the most with multipliers worth up to 10,000x in the free spins.
FAQ
Which online casinos have Hot Zone Wild?
Use the list of Hot Zone Wild casinos to see all online casinos that have Hot Zone Wild. We filter the casino top list to only show Hot Zone Wild casinos that accept players from your location.
What is the Return to Player (RTP) for Hot Zone Wild?
The Hot Zone Wild RTP is 95.96%. An RTP of 95.96% puts Hot Zone Wild among slots with a below-average Return to Player. An Average RTP is at least 96%, and a high RTP at least 98%.