Description
It’s an old Hawaiian term for shaman, but people use it generically to refer to a head honcho or boss. Now you can play Big Kahuna Slot, the bright and colourful five-reel, nine-Payline slot from Microgaming which takes the South Pacific as its theme. (It’s also the predecessor to Big Kahuna: Snakes and Ladders.)
Bonuses include a couple of mini-games, and you should find there are enough features here generally to maintain interest. The scene is the forest at night, complete with background sounds of jungle wildlife and chirping tree frogs.
How to play
All the controls you’d expect to find, such as Max Bet, Autoplay and Spin, are here, and you can form wins diagonally or horizontally. Wins are paid from left to right apart from the Scatter, which will pay wherever it falls. The maximum bet is 45 coins a spin, the minimum 0.5.
Before embarking on your adventure in Hawaii, choose the number of coins you want to bet, and their value. Play as many of the flexible Paylines as you can to maximise your chances of activating the bonus features.
Just as with an old-school fruit machine, you’ll see some familiar-looking symbols here among the big, bold icons, including melons, oranges, pineapples, coconuts and kiwi fruit. Higher-paying icons include the tribal mask and the volcano, while other symbols include the dancing shaman and the iguana.
Big Kahuna Slot special features
Special symbols
The grinning monkey symbol serves as the Scatter, the Big Kahuna logo as the Wild. The latter has a potential 8,000x payout when you land five on an active Payline, and when Max Bet is activated. One thing to bear in mind, though, is that the Wild only replaces other icons to create winning combinations where the fruit symbols are involved.
While typically the Scatter activates a game’s bonus features, in Big Kahuna Slot the bonus symbols that do this are the tribal mask and the volcano.
Bonus games
Volcano bonus feature
This launches once you have at least three of the volcano emblems on the reels. You’ll be taken to a new screen, where you need to make the ‘sacrifice’ of a piece of fruit by popping it into the volcano. And you take pot luck, given that each piece of fruit yields a different prize value.
Mask bonus feature
Land between three and five of the Tiki mask symbols on any active Payline to launch this one. You’ll need to take your pick from 10 different masks, which hide random bonus sums. But if you open a mask that has no winnings, the round ends. The game is also over once you find Collect behind a mask.
Return to Player (RTP)
Return to Player or RTP for the non-progressive Big Kahuna is average-to-good at 96.2%.
Verdict
Some of the graphics on this game may feel a little dated these days, and one or two reviewers have remarked that the bonus features can feel quite short-lived. But Big Kahuna Slot remains amusing and fun to play and has certainly stood the test of time. It’s also a good-looking game, as well as being potentially lucrative.
Try it out in free demo mode before you spend any real money – and let us know how you get on.
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