Hot Ross Demo: Free Play and Review

Ro$$ grows down, Hot Ro$$ fills the reel

Ro$$ is a cat's head on a long black body. It stretches only if the stretched version completes a line, running from where it landed to the bottom row as a Wild on every square. Otherwise it stays a one-square Wild, and a reel never holds two cats.

That was 13.8x the bet, with no multiplier. A head that lands lower covers less.

Hot Ro$$, the same head on a yellow and pink striped tile, jumps to the top and fills its reel wherever it landed.

Multipliers need a Wild in the cat's path

The 200x comes from the plain Wild, a bomb marked W. A Ro$$ stretching through one, or a Hot Ro$$ reel covering one, turns the whole cat into a multiplier: 2x to 10x in steps of one, then 15x, 20x, 25x, 50x, 100x or 200x. Values add up, both under one cat and across cats in one line.

Multipliers were rare in our log: seven of 500 spins, x2 five times, x3 once (a Hot Ro$$ over a Wild on spin 47) and x4 once. The best of them, spin 249, paid €24.00, four €3.00 lines doubled.

Activated reels and a guaranteed Hot Ro$$ pair

The bonus depends on how many FS symbols land, three, four or five; two or three FS inside add 2 or 4 spins. Unlike RIP City's Ro$$ Bonus, nothing in GAME INFO lets one round turn into another.

Nine Lives works like RIP City's Maxx Bonus, and its rules add a limit: once four or more reels are activated, FS symbols can no longer land.

Our one bonus in 500 logged spins was a Cat Calls on spin 466. On its second free spin a Hot Ro$$ filled reel 1 and made the Ro$$ at the top of reel 2 cover that reel as well; the spin paid €58.80. Four of the ten spins paid nothing, and the round closed at €164.20.

Bought, it costs 100x the bet and returns 96.27%.

The round we filmed was bought once at €2.00. Free spin 2 brought Hot Ro$$ to reels 1 and 2, and the Ro$$ beside them on reel 3 jumped to the top: three wild reels, €126.00. A Hot Ro$$ on reel 5 later pulled up the Ro$$ on reel 4 for €40.00, and TOTAL WIN stopped at €174.00, 87x the bet and €26.00 short of the price.

Expanded cats paid most of the base game

Away from the screen, a script logged 500 paid spins of €2.00 on Hacksaw's demo server.

Only 20.2% of spins paid, close to RIP City's 19.2% in the same kind of log. A cat expanded in 53 of the 499 spins outside the bonus, and those spins brought €394.20 of the base game's €486.00; spin 251, joint best at 18x, had two stretched Ro$$ and no multiplier.

The balance sank to €4,503.60 on spin 456, and Cat Calls came 10 spins later. Without it the sample returns 48.6% instead of 65%.

Six buy cards, two of them at 1,000x

Three FeatureSpins cards bill every spin until DISABLE is pressed; three buy a bonus outright. The two dearest share one price, 1,000x: Epic Drop FeatureSpins charges it on every spin, Bigg Boss Ross once.

Hacksaw's frame above is set to 96.32%; casino listings also name 94.23%, 92.23% and 86.16%, and where a market bans bonus buys the menu is missing.

Scatter rules and other details

Every answer but the last quotes GAME INFO in the demo; the last one comes from our log.

Ro$$ before and after the spin-off

Set beside RIP City, the grid is unchanged: 5x5, 19 lines, a black-and-white alley, multipliers that still top out at 200x, and a paytable with the same values, from 5x for five 10s to 20x for five of the top symbol and 25x for five Wilds.

Around it, the cap rises from 12,500x to 15,000x and the default RTP from 96.22% to 96.32%. Hot Ro$$ is new, there are three bonuses instead of two, and the dearest card costs 1,000x where RIP City's stopped at 200x.

For RIP City regulars, Hot Ross adds a second route to a full wild reel and a steeper top end. Our log looked like a 5 out of 5 game: one bonus, a 65% return and seven multiplied spins in 500.