Pumpkin Smash Review

The sound of exciting Mexican music, skulls with priceless gems infused with them, and a day to celebrate those who have passed away. Yggdrasil’s newest release, Pumpkin Smash, is clearly…

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The sound of exciting Mexican music, skulls with priceless gems infused with them, and a day to celebrate those who have passed away. Yggdrasil’s newest release, Pumpkin Smash, is clearly themed after the famous Day of the Dead celebrations, a holiday in Mexico that can be traced back to the old days of the Aztecs, rooted before even Spanish colonisation of the region occurred.

The celebration lasts for several days, and sees families gather to pray for friends and family members who have since passed away, building small, private altars called ofrendas which are decorated with fake human skulls, Mexican marigolds, and favourite food and drinks that the deceased loved. Certainly a wonderful tradition to observe, and a great theme to base their slot on.

With 5 reels and 20 paylines, it could have simply been an easy to cash in game that so happens to coincide with the Halloween season, which would have been more than enough to draw attention to it. However, Yggdrasil knocked it out of the park with this medium variance title that builds itself around a single bonus – that of pumpkins.

If you get at least two pumpkins, you can smash them for cash prizes, free spins and even multipliers, and if you get three or more at once, then the extra turns are guaranteed to you. To spice things up, you need just one pumpkin to get more of these bonuses once the free spins are up and running.

Developer

Founded in 2013 by a former NetEnt CEO, Fredrik Elmqvist, Yggdrasil is a company based in Malta that was formed around creating technologically impressive and fun slots that gamblers across the world could enjoy.

The difference in structure between it and bigger developers is easy to see – the releases of this developers are a bit spaced in between, and each one has attention put into it to make sure it pans out perfectly. As the company has grown, this has diminished somewhat, but Yggdrasil’s games are still among the most fun to play and experience to this day. If medium and high variance titles are what you crave, they usually have you covered.

How to play it

Pumpkin Smash looks very pretty, if a bit cartoonish. It certainly puts on a cheery vibe – the music is upbeat, the skulls make funny faces and laugh when they’re part of the winning combination, and even the altar falls into place, assembled before your very eyes. Not really up to the standards ofa ofrenda, but it seems Yggdrasil’s release decided to go with the rule of cool rather than being overtly accurate about things.

Gameplay wise, the slot has periods of awesome scoring and periods of relative silence, well deserving of its medium volatility. While the pumpkins are rolling in, your wins are jumping slowly but certainly – even without the free spins bonus, we managed to go in a heavy plus. After the pumpkins dry up, there’s a bit of a spell of dead spins and small wins that will slowly bleed your money, though we find that can also be broken in by an occasional cash influx from time to time. It provides a fun combo of things, as it keeps you interested in spinning, in hopes of getting that exciting start back.

Special Features

The pumpkins are the kickstarter to all the bonuses in Pumpkin Smash. The secondary bonus only requires two pumpkins on the reels at the same time, and it rewards gamblers with a cash prize – and the bigger the pumpkin, the more prizes lie inside it. As such, a large pumpkin is more or less always full of good loot, whether that’s cash, or something more.

Pumpkins can also contain multipliers for the various symbols on the playing field, or free spins that you can activate. The extra turns bonus, by itself, is guaranteed if you get more than three pumpkins at once, and you get between 7 to 32 free spins. To spice things up, once the extra spins are triggered, even one pumpkin is enough to get a shot at getting more symbol multipliers, extra turns, or more cash prizes.

Maximum Payouts

In other games, we have no doubt that all the big, juicy wins would be locked behind the free spins, and we have to admit, we’ve yet to go with a round of them that didn’t end in a win that was at least 50x our wager.

That said, they are rare and difficult to track down, which is why the pumpkins themselves can more than pull their weight. We’ve had an 80x win from a pair of pumpkins as a cash prize, and a streak of them is guaranteed to keep your balance in the green, so make good on them while they last.

Summary

This Yggdrasil release is hands down one of their better as 2017 slowly craws to a close. Pumpkin Smash outright smashed our expectations, and showed that these developers still have the magic touch, something that was shaken a bit with Jungle Books and its low volatility.

But with their newest slot a smashing success, we have no doubt that Yggdrasil will be around for many more years, and we hope they continue this course.

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