Hot Potato!

Hot Potato: Slot Overview

Hot Potato, as some may know it up until now, is a party game where a group of people toss an object between each other until a timing device goes off, then the person holding the object is out. It's as if the object is an actual hot potato, which burns your fingers if you're unable to pass it to the next person. Or, a hot potato can be just that, a potato heated up for human consumption. This latter definition is closer to what happens in the online slot Hot Potato! from Swedish developer Thunderkick. For this game, the studio had headed to the kitchen to cook up some scorching hot cluster-paying grid slot mayhem that offers some furious multiplicative action when the tater heats up.

Hot Potato! doesn't start in the kitchen, though. You'll need to activate free spins to get to the hottest portion of the game. Till then, play takes place outside in a densely skyscrapered terrain, a yellow cab off to the side of the screen, hinting at New York City or somewhere equally built up. The game's 'Hot Potato!' name blazes up top like the title of a B-movie action or horror flick, dropping a hint of the manic potato character later to come. With luck, the feisty potato will hit as often as possible because when it does, it means multipliers are going to follow. With its bright cartoon demeanour, Hot Potato!, like a steaming version of its namesake, provides a healthy dose of enticement.

What can really make or break a hot potato IRL is what's been stuffed inside – cheese, sour cream, butter, and so on. In Hot Potato!, its innards consist of a highly volatile math model dripping a default RTP of 96.16%. This figure increases to 96.44% when buying the free spins round for the cost of 100 times the bet. Bet levels, then, go from a low of 10 c per spin up to a maximum of $/€100, and when hitting spin, 49 symbols tumble onto the 7x7 grid.

A win is formed when five or more identical pay symbols land next to each other in horizontal or vertical directions. Winning clusters are removed from the grid by the Avalanche feature, and symbols tumble down from above to fill all of the empty spaces, providing another chance to win. From low to high, Hot Potato!'s pay symbols are a cucumber, a doughnut, a soda can, fries, a burger, and a chef. Not many, huh? Values-wise, you're looking at 0.1x to 1x the bet for a 5-symbol cluster or 10 to 100 times the bet for a 25+ sized cluster.

Hot Potato: Slot Features

Where the potato character leaps into action is as the Exploding Wild symbol, accompanied by a Multiplier Grid and a bonus game.

Exploding Wild Symbol

The Exploding Wild can randomly appear and explode during a spin or Avalanche, or it can be automatically generated and explode in a cluster pay area. When it explodes, it removes all symbols in a 3x3 area, creating a Multiplier Grid. Wild symbols substitute for all regular pay symbols.

Multiplier Grid

Each position in a Multiplier Grid gets a multiplier with a starting value of x2. If new Exploding Wilds land and explode on top of a Multiplier Grid, the affected multiplier values are doubled, up to x128. Multiplier Grid values are additive, so if a cluster win covers an x2 and an x32, the win is multiplied by x34.

Bonus Game

The bonus game is triggered or retriggered by landing 3 scatter symbols anywhere on the reels. This awards 10 free spins. Any Multiplier Grids active in the base game reset at the start of the bonus game. However, any Multiplier Grids created during free spins are persistent and remain active till the round ends.

Hot Potato: Slot Verdict

The previous Thunderkick slot reviewed, Bones & Bounty managed to impress, so there was a certain gleeful rubbing of hands in anticipation as to what the studio might do next. Hot Potato! is different from the previous game in many regards – it's a cluster-paying grid slot with a vastly different bonus round compared to Bones & Bounty's innovative hold 'n win feature. The last game was all about ghostly pirates; this one's about food, including a living eye-balled potato at that. Despite the differences, both slots can be an absolute blast when in action. Hot Potato is simplistic in some ways but supplies gameplay, which can seriously boil over when the going's good.

Glimpses of chaos occurred during the base game when wins formed up in tandem with potatoes, leaving grids of multiplier values all over the place. Multiplier Grids are cleared between base game spins, though, so it was not till free spins were active that the full potential became apparent. Hot Potato! did give off strong Sugar Rush vibes, especially when vast swaths of the reel area possessed some sort of multiplier value, looking like the puzzle game 2048. Naturally, not every session will be a scorcher, and Thunderkick slots can be tough to crack, but with a max win of 10,000x the bet up for grabs, Hot Potato! can be rather hot. Having said that, the advertised max win potential in Thunderkick slots has drawn attention and skepticism from the community due to the lack of max wins shared on social media and elsewhere. Something to keep in mind.

While Hot Potato's gameplay is relatively straightforward, it is straightforward in an entirely fun way. The potato symbol tended to hit frequently, more so in free spins; Avalanches were plentiful, resulting in loads of activity taking place on the reels. Like Bones & Bounty, Hot Potato! shows that the Thunderkick team continue to tinker away in its workshop, turning out cleverly engaging slots which are easy to kick back and enjoy.