Big Bass Bonanza Slot Review

Five years on, the game that started the Big Bass franchise is the one member of it that will not sell you the bonus. Big Bass Bonanza is a 5x3 slot with 10 fixed lines, made by Reel Kingdom and released through Pragmatic Play in December 2020. The RTP runs at 96.71% on the top setting, with a 2,100x ceiling and no buy button anywhere. Almost everything the game pays comes from one place - a fisherman who exists only inside the free spins, catching the cash values printed on the fish - and those free spins turn up about once in 113 spins.

What the base game does in the meantime is show you the money. Fish land with prices on them on every spin, base game included, while the only symbol that can take those prices is absent from the base game entirely. That is the whole experience in one sentence; the rest of this review is what it looked like at $2 a spin.

The base game has no features. None - no wild, no respin, no modifier, nothing that fires on its own. Its one job is to land three leaping-bass scatters anywhere on the reels, which takes about 113 spins on average; across roughly 380 spins of ours it happened three times.

What it does have is fish with price tags. Some of the fish on every spin sit on an orange plaque with a cash value printed under them, $10, $30, $100 at our $2 stake. The values are real: they are exactly what a fisherman would collect if one were on the reels. He never is. The fisherman lives on the free-spin reels alone, so every dollar sign you see between features is a number you are being shown and cannot have. One spin put a $100 bass on the fourth reel with four smaller fish around it and paid zero.

Around the fish, the reels pay lines, left to right from the first reel, three of a kind minimum - and they pay them rarely. Of the 77 base spins we have the full record of, 72 returned nothing at all. The other five came back $2, $6, $6, $20 and $50, that last one 25x the stake and the best thing the base game did all afternoon. Five of the ten symbols are card royals that pay the same 10x for a full line of five; the float pays 200x for five and is the only symbol that pays for a pair. A paytable six tiers deep with half of it identical is the game telling you where not to look.

The game's own rules page labels it low volatility. Nothing about playing it agrees. That run of blanks is not a low-volatility record; neither is a balance $273 down before the first feature arrived. The studio's own volatility rating for the game is four out of five; the session sided with the studio.

Three scatters give 10 spins, four give 15, five give 20. The round is a collector bonus of the fisherman-catches-fish kind: the fish keep landing with their values; now a fisherman can land too, on any reel, taking every value on the screen the moment he does. He pays nothing as a symbol. Catching is his only job.

Two things decide what a round is worth, neither of them how many fish you see. The first is whether a fisherman lands at all. Our first round was ten spins of fish - $100 bass on four separate spins, $904 of printed values across the round - and one fisherman, on spin eight, on one of the poorest boards of the round. The round paid $41. The other fish were shown, admired, and swept away one spin at a time.

The second is how many fishermen land together, because each one collects the whole board on his own. Two on the same spin took a $40 board twice over for $80, with no multiplier running. A fisherman on an empty board collects nothing, which happened to us on the fifth spin of the second round. The game says that fish can be scattered onto the reels at random when a lone fisherman lands with nothing to catch; on that occasion none were, so treat it as a lucky extra rather than a safety net. What that fisherman still did was count: one of the four the next retrigger needs.

The counting is the point. Every fourth fisherman caught during a round adds 10 spins and turns the collect multiplier up: x2 on the fourth, x3 on the eighth, x10 on the twelfth. There it stops. Three retriggers, twelve fishermen, that is the whole ladder, drawn on a wooden strip above the reels for the entire round so you always know how far you are from the next rung.

Which means three of every four fishermen are a tally mark. They collect whatever is on the board, then they advance the counter, which is the only thing in the game that changes what a board is worth. Our second round proved it. Fifteen spins to start with, four fishermen by spin 14, the retrigger card, ten more spins at x2. Then on spin 21 a single fisherman landed on a board carrying $78 of fish and took $156. The round closed at $238, 119x the stake; that one doubled collect was most of it.

Scatters cannot retrigger anything; they do not appear on the free-spin reels at all. The fisherman count is the only route to more spins; it does not reset between batches, so a round that reaches four early has the rest of its spins to reach eight and the x3.

The ceiling is 2,100x, a hard stop rather than a target. A round that reaches 2,100x ends on the spot, pays, and throws away whatever spins were left. The best possible outcome in Big Bass Bonanza is a round cut short.

There are two ways to get near it and both are lottery odds. The fish carry eight possible values: 2x, 5x, 10x, 15x, 20x, 25x, 50x, and then, with nothing in between, 2,000x. That last fish alone is 95% of the ceiling; it still needs a fisherman on the same screen to be worth anything. We saw the other seven values over and over. We never saw the 2,000x once. The other route is the x10 rung, which needs twelve fishermen in one round; our best round managed five. The odds of the maximum are 1 in 3,880,481 spins.

That ceiling is what the sequels went after. Bigger Bass Bonanza took it to 4,000x on a 5x4 board, Big Bass Bonanza - Keeping it Reel to 10,000x, Big Bass Bonanza 1000 to 20,000x, and Big Bass Splash 1000 to 25,000x. A handful kept the 2,100x cap, Christmas Big Bass Bonanza and 888 Big Bass Bonanza among them; those are reskins rather than upgrades. So the question this game asks is not whether you can win big here. It is whether you want the original at its original 2,100x, for its 96.71%.

It looks like a cross-section of a lake, sky along the top and green-blue water below. The reels have no frame at all; the water shows straight through them, which almost nobody does. The symbols are chunky cartoon tackle: a red box spilling lures, a brass reel on a rod, a dragonfly, a float in its ripple, and plastic-looking royals underneath. All of it is cool-toned on purpose. The fisherman and the leaping-bass scatter are the only two tiles drawn against an orange sunset, so the two symbols that matter are the two you cannot miss; a free spin with the fisherman on it reads warm from across the room. Reel Kingdom's name sits in the corner of every screen; Pragmatic Play's does not.

This is the founding game of the Big Bass series, which has since grown past thirty titles. It is also itself a cover version: the fisherman collecting cash fish is Fishin' Frenzy's idea; what Reel Kingdom added was the multiplier that climbs with each retrigger. That addition is the franchise. Every sequel kept it. Every sequel also added the one thing this game lacks, a buy button.

The nearest thing to it from the same studio with a review of its own here is Deep Sea Frenzy, which runs the fisherman-collects-fish round on a 5x4 board with a 16,000x ceiling and a 33% hit rate, against a base game here that mostly pays nothing while you wait. That is the game to open if you want the fisherman and a base game that hits a third of the time - here, the base game is the wait.

For it

• Each fisherman collects the whole board separately, so two on one spin double it outright.
• One retrigger turns a 15-spin round into 25; the x2 doubled a single collect in our session.
• 96.71% on the top setting, higher than most of the family that followed, and a $0.10 floor.
• The ladder, the values, and the count are all on screen the whole round. Nothing is hidden.

Against it

• No bonus buy, and a base game with nothing in it but the scatter hunt.
• A 2,100x cap that ends the round and forfeits the remaining spins when it is reached.
• The RTP can be set as low as 94.60% by the casino, so open the rules page before you settle in.
• The 2,000x fish is theoretical. We never saw one.

One fisherman on one board after the x2 had switched on is what the whole session came down to: the first round paid almost nothing, the second a hundred-odd stakes mostly from that single doubled collect; the balance ended $52 up at $2 a spin after sitting well down for most of it. That is the shape of Big Bass Bonanza: nothing, nothing, nothing, a feature that depends entirely on whether a fisherman shows up, and a ceiling its own sequels have since raised to 25,000x. The retrigger ladder is still a good idea; the RTP is better than most of the games that copied it. But the game will not sell you the round, nor offer anything while you wait for one.

The player it still suits is the one who wants the first version of the fisherman, at $2 a spin and 113 spins between catches, and does not mind that the biggest fish in the lake is one they will never see.