Beasty Blox Gigablox

Beasty Blox Gigablox: Slot Overview

Yggdrasil Gaming's pals Jelly has dragged their more established partner's slot mechanic Gigablox out for another blast. Jelly's previous outing was Buffalo Blox Gigablox which looked nice, though it was a tad underwhelming amongst the growing range of Gigablox slots. For numero due, Jelly has stuck with an animal theme but has gone with a completely different cast of critters. The result is Beasty Blox Gigablox, a jungle-themed game with a more conventional set of Gigablox features than the last one, as well as some pretty neat stuff not seen before.

Welcome to the jungle, yo, as Beasty Blox Gigablox is held in a bushy verdant spot, and one with a prickly ominous touch as well. What might have intrepid journeyers second-guessing is the spear bobbing up and down on the left-hand side and a pole with a skull rammed on top. Someone is sending a pretty clear message they don't want visitors on their patch. By someone, it appears that the belligerent party is made up of animals dressed in human clothes rather than humans themselves. Like Buffalo Blox, Beasty Blox has a nice look to it, the artwork cleanly done and bursting with neat touches, big and small.

A little disappointingly, Jelly has stuck with the 95% RTP value as the default, which isn't terrible, but a higher level would've made Beasty Blox more competitive amongst its Gigablox peers. Anyhoo, it also comes with a highly volatile math model and one single way of being played. That is, wagering 20 p/c to $/€50 per spin, meaning no ante bet or feature buy is at hand to potentially fast-track to the more exciting bits.

Held together with four pieces of lashed wood is Beasty Blox Gigablox's game grid. It's got 6 reels, 4 rows and has 4,096 ways to win, where matching symbols landing on adjacent reels from the leftmost side are required to trigger a payout. The pay symbols consist of leafy 9-A card royals worth 1 to 1.5 times the bet for 6 OAK, then a snake, a croc, a lion, and a gorilla that pay 3 to 6 times the bet for a 6 symbol win. Skull wilds help complete wins by substituting for all pay symbols and may land on all but the four central reels.

Beasty Blox Gigablox: Slot Features

For features, Beasty Blox's traditional extras include the Gigablox mechanic itself and free spins, while the less common ones are wild multipliers in free spins and Super Staxx.

Gigablox

Randomly, the game merges reels to create Gigablox symbols. These symbols land in blocks of up to 4x4 in size. For the purposes of win evaluations, Gigablox symbols are broken down into 1x1-sized symbols to do so. All paid symbols or Super Staxx symbols can land on the reels as Gigablox - wilds or diamonds cannot. Gigablox are guaranteed to be active on every spin.

Free Spins

Diamond symbols are Beasty Blox's scatter. Landing at least 5 scatter symbols triggers the free spins feature – each scatter can reveal 1 or 2 free spins. The minimum number of free spins awarded is 6. During free spins, wilds reveal win multipliers of x2 or x3, and wild multipliers multiply each other. Also, wild multipliers are always active in free spins; they do not need to be part of a win to activate.

Super Staxx

Super Staxx symbols are available in free spins only. When Super Staxx land, they reveal any pay symbol – never wilds or scatters. Super Staxx reveal 2 to 5 ways per revealed symbol.

Beasty Blox Gigablox: Slot Verdict

Some good ideas have been implanted in Beasty Blox Gigablox, yet it's a shame they didn't appear more often or in greater numbers. Super Staxx, for one, is a great idea for a Gigablox game which uses a ways to win pay system. Super Staxx would have been interesting had it been used with fixed paylines, but hitting it with thousands of ways was quite a stirring thought. Shame then that Super Staxx didn't appear a lot, and when it did, it didn't seem to do much. Who knows, maybe we simply lucked out? Still, it's early days; perhaps Jelly will roll Super Staxx out again and let it flex more often in future Gigablox slots.

Other favourable elements are the wild multipliers in free spins – active whether they are used in the actual win or not. A generous touch. Not sure what the free spins hit frequency is, but they didn't trigger super often either. It's like, you know there is good stuff to experience here, yet the game holds its cards close to its chest, reluctant to dole them out much. Players with the patience to sit it out in an attempt to prise the best stuff out of Beasty Blox Gigablox vice-like kung fu grip may be rewarded. With winning potential of 5,000x the bet, the max win is nearly double-ish what it was in Jelly's previous Gigablox game.

What might help with the wait is Beasty Blox Gigablox's artwork, which is pleasing to the eyes. Maybe a bit of extra tease, a bit more frequent use of the features wouldn't have gone amiss, though. If Super Staxx, which is arguably the most original thing about Beasty Blox, had been made available in the base game, perhaps it would have been more engaging. There is good stuff here, but the relentless serving of plain vanilla base game spins did get tedious, and while Beasty Blox Gigablox sits around the middle of the Gigablox xylophone of slots, there are far more explosively engaging options to select from.