Bombuster

Bombuster Review

For many years now the trend of minimalistic design continues to gain momentum worldwide, and many developers within the casino industry stick to the fad. Thus, they decided to bring their vision of a quality retro-minimalistic game into masses. Bombuster is a brand new slot featuring not only the below-mentioned theme, but also a couple of exciting extras to keep you entertained during the session and, of course, lead you to big prizes.

Bombuster - Theme and Design

Since we have already touched upon the theme, let's pay a bit more attention to it and review the setting in greater detail. As alluded to earlier, Bombuster comes in a retro styling with minimalistic elements. Not to say that it makes it stand out from a pile of other same-styled slot machines, though, we should pay tribute to the designer team who managed to make it look actually cool. The reels are set in some kind of virtual space full of lightness and straight lines. The background reminds of the first Tron game, where almost everything consisted of straight lines, though, it was done for a particular reason, unlike in Bombuster, where this kind of approach only highlights the retro styling and is only cosmetic. The game actually offers perfect aesthetics when it comes to the game's appearance and dynamic. The overall look, despite being minimalistic and old-school, is astonishing and paired with the soundtrack creates an immersive atmosphere of playing an actual slot machine from the 80s. The soundtrack really plays a big role and creates an authentic feeling of immersion into the slot and captures the essential retro vibe.

Bombuster - Technical Info

Bombuster may be considered a retro game by all meanings, as even the math model is as old-school as possible. By saying this we mean hardcore. The RTP is slightly below the average level of 96%, being just 95.74%, and the hit frequency leaves much to be desired. Based on our experience of approx. 200 spins, it feels like only 1 out of 10 spins was successful, though, we didn't manage to hit something really decent. The potential is decent, though, the math model is hella brutal and feels like a patience test since you'll have to spend quite a great deal of time awaiting the big wins to arrive. Playable from 0.1$ to 40$ per spin, the game offers a maximum payout of 2,020.2x of the bet. Not to say that 2k times the stake is low, however, it's probably not worth the risk, taking into consideration the extremely severe gameplay. In case you play with the max bet option available you can hope for a prize of up to 80,808$ on a single spin.

The actions in Bombuster take place across a 7-reel 7-row grid with Cluster Pays mechanic. Unlike the classical paylines, clusters are randomly generated at the beginning of each spin and you don't get a fixed number of ways to play. Symbols are part of clusters, which can even reach 7x7 in size. In Bombuster, you'll require at least 5 symbols horizontally or vertically adjacent to form a winning cluster.

Bombuster - Symbols

The reels are made up of various all-familiar symbols, which are presented in almost every fruit slot. Those include in ascending order cherries, lemons, oranges, plums, watermelons, stars, bells, and sevens. All the symbols are depicted in a minimalistic style and hence look notably appealing. The minimalistic style of symbols in a retro setting in a weird way worked out pretty well and the end result is just gorgeous. As mentioned before, you'll have to land at least 5 instances of the same symbol horizontally or vertically adjacent to get rewarded, and the biggest prizes are given for matching 40+ symbols. The paytable for the clusters of 40+ symbols is given below:

• Sevens - 1000x of the bet.
• Bells - 900x of the bet.
• Stars - 800x of the bet.
• Watermelons - 500x of the bet.
• Plums - 400x of the bet.
• Oranges - 300x of the bet.
• Lemons - 250x of the bet.
• Cherries - 200x of the bet.

You might have thought that Bombuster is too generous with such big payouts, however, it's not. For making a cluster of 5-7 symbols everything you can get is 1x of the bet, and it's top-paying one, while the least valuable symbol will award you with only 0.1 times the stake. There's also a Wild symbol included, though, it only acts as a basic substitute without having any own value.

Bombuster - Bonus Features

Cluster Pays mechanic works really perfectly paired with the Cascading Wins feature. Every time you score a win, all the winning clusters get removed, creating space for new symbols to appear. New ones tumble down onto the reels, creating new combinations. The feature is pretty lucrative, as it can launch a chain reaction of consecutive wins which in turn will bestow you great prizes.

The game called Bombuster has its name for a reason, as the involved features include various explosive symbols, namely bombs. The bombs are the only thing you should expect to discover before opening the paytable since the devs omitted even the Free Spins bonus round leaving nothing but colorful bombs. Even the Wilds cannot land onto the grid by themselves and are strongly connected to the bombs mechanic. 

The bombs appear at random and get locked in their positions for a particular duration before exploding. A special blast pattern is attached to each bomb, displaying the direction of the explosion. The detonations reach borders of the slot and can be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. There are 3 kinds of bombs, each one having a particular extra to assist you in making symbol clusters:

• Wild Bomb. The yellow bomb gets locked for up to 200 spins before blowing up. When the bomb explodes, it turns all the symbols into Wilds in its explosive path. The Wilds will be revealed even if overlapped by other bomb explosions.
• Swap Bomb. The green bomb gets locked for up to 50 spins. After exploding, it leaves one symbol type in its explosive path, and multiple Swap Bomb explosions at the same time reveal identical symbols. 
• Destroy Bomb. The red bomb locks up for up to 3 spins before blowing up. The bomb removes all the symbols in its explosive path, allowing new ones to tumble down onto the grid, though, it cannot remove the symbols created by either Swap or Wild bombs.

The 200 Spins Experience

Bombuster indeed had attracted us with the authentic mechanic and this lovely retro setting so we decided to give it a test and check out whether it was as fun in fact as on paper. It's necessary to mention that 200 spins are not enough to track any patterns and give any statistics on the game, thus here we'll describe our personal experience and subjective opinion on the slot.

We set our bet to 1$ per spin and enabled the autospins mode. We knew that Bombuster is not the most rewarding game since the max payout is only slightly higher than 2,000 times the bet, however, it didn't take us a long time to realize that the hit rate is extremely poor and even though the math model is a medium volatile one, the wins won't occur too often to keep you afloat. It really felt brutal, and the involved features actually left much to be desired. The bombs led to nothing, and especially the red ones, which are actually useless. The others had been inactive for an eternity until eventually blowing up, though, with not much help also. It took us approximately 100 spins to land a single decent win, which didn't even exceed 17x of the bet.

To conclude, Bombuster is an extremely uneventful game and you won't find anything here to get super fired. The smiles from our faces disappeared after approximately 50 spins, most of which were non-winning, and the rest of the session was boredom. We did not only lose 160 bucks but also felt really frustrated due to our high expectations. Maybe it was just a bad run and those who are blessed with fortune will manage to benefit from this title, however, the fact is a fact that the appearance is the strong suit here, while the complete feature set is a letdown.

Bombuster - Verdict

Pros	Cons
Appealing styling and visual appearance	Brutal math model
Retro-gaming style	Skimped on features (no Free Spins or basic Wilds)
	Long wait for bombs to explode

All up, Bombuster is a pretty fun attraction, however, the joy will last first couple minutes of gameplay, until you realize how brutal the game is. We do not deny, that such a hardcore style will appeal to a particular interlayer of players, especially those, who are into a retro setting and old-school gameplay, however, less risky players who prefer relaxing sessions won't get too much of excitement during the gameplay. The math model is the main downside of Bombuster. though, there are a couple of other issues worth mentioning. As you probably have already noticed, has skimped on features, omitting Free Spins or even the basic Wilds. Moreover, you'll lose your mind awaiting the bombs to blow up.

In a nutshell, the styling and visual appearance are of top-notch quality. All the other aspects of the game are less appealing and leave much to be desired, though, it's still up to you to decide whether Bombuster is worth your time and money. If you fell yourself like a fan of retro-gaming, this title is certainly may become a perfect choice for you.