Buggin

Bugs are quite a niche theme in all sorts of media. For the most part, they tend to freak people out, but in some rare instances, bugs have managed to come across as sweet, relatable and quite popular (I’m looking at you Bugs Life). Perhaps ELK Studios was thinking of Pixar’s bug-filled odyssey when it decided to come up with Buggin, a video slot that gives us a closer look at the lives of these busy insects.

The theme takes on an animated look and feel, with the bugs being animated to resemble the way people act and behave. You also get a great selection of special features, including cascading reels, wilds, reel modifiers, free spins and more.

So, does this bug-filled online slot ultimately pull it off? Read on below to find out.

⚡ RTP	94%
🎲 Volatility	Medium
💰 Paylines	Cluster Pays
🔼 Maximum Bet	100
🔻 Minimum Bet	0.20
⭐ Bonus Features	Cascading Reels, Wilds, Stacked Wilds, Scatter Symbols, Free Spins, X-Iter, Progress Bar, Reel Modifiers

Buggin Slot Game Free Demo

Before you start putting your money on the line, I suggest checking out the Buggin free demo. It’s the perfect way to get to grips with all the slot’s features without having to risk any of your funds. This can give you a better idea of what these mechanics do and just how often they get triggered. You can even play around with the X-Iter options on offer to see if they can ultimately be worth your while. This is also the perfect way to decide on an ideal bet level that can adequately suit your gambling budget.

Pro Tips:

Despite its medium level of volatility, Buggin can be quite tricky when trying to hit those higher wins. You’ll need quite the lucky streak to stack together enough bonus features and potentially get anywhere near the 10,000x maximum win. As always, no strategy will improve your chances of success. So, your best bet is to manage your bankroll efficiently, picking a bet level that you can comfortably sustain over a long period. The X-Iter features are worth checking out, although both bonus buy options can be quite expensive.

Buggin Slot Bonus Features

You play across seven reels and seven rows that have been infested by all kinds of colourful insects. The reels can give you up to 49 symbols in each round and you’ll be looking for clusters of identical symbols to claim the slot’s payouts. Cluster pays only payout when you have a minimum of five identical symbols connected in horizontal or vertical directions. The more symbols you have in the cluster, the bigger the payout.

Garden flora represents the slot’s low-paying symbols, and you get a leaf, berry, grapes and mushroom at the lower end of the paytable. Over in the higher end of the spectrum, you’ll find the buzzing bugs themselves, including a ladybug, snail, cricket and ant. Clusters of five symbols will get you wins between 0.1x and 1x your bet, whereas the largest clusters made up of 12 symbols or more get you pays of 1.5x to 100x your stake.

These are just the basics of course, and you can look forward to loads of exciting special features and mechanics.

Cascading Reels

Any symbols that form part of a winning combination are removed from the reels and their empty spaces are replaced with symbols that cascade from the top of the grid. Wild symbols are the only tokens that aren’t removed from the reels, but if there are no wilds in the cluster win, a wild symbol with a 1x win multiplier spawns on one of the empty tiles before the rest of the symbols drop down. Once there are no new wins on the reels, any collected feature wilds are released and the cascade run comes to an end.

Mega Symbols

All of the slot’s pay symbols can pop up in three different sizes. The 1×1 regular size is the most common, but you can also get them in Mega symbol sizes of 2×2 and 3×3. These mega symbols pay out the same amount of 1×1 symbols they’d cover.

Wilds

Wilds can be crucial to helping you put together wins in Buggin, stepping in for regular pay symbols to help form winning combinations and enhance existing ones. They land as stacks that can be partly or fully visible on the grid.

If you get several wild symbols in a winning cluster, these tokens merge into a single wild and add their win multiplier values together. Wild symbols can form part of several winning clusters in a single round, so they can be added to lots of different wild mergers.

On every spin, one of the feature wilds on the wild inventory will have a wild redrop target. Any feature wilds you collect up to the wild redrop target awards you with a wild redrop that contains the number of gathered feature wilds. If you collect more feature wilds over the target, these tokens are added to the feature wilds you’d get through the wild redrop.

The wild re-drop then kicks off once there are no more wins on the grid. During this phase, regular wilds remain sticky and the collected feature wilds are filled and dropped onto the reels.

Progress Bar

All your winning symbols are collected and added to the progress bar that sits atop the reels. Once you fill up the bar, a random feature wild is collected on the leftmost empty slot of the wild inventory and the bar is reset. The activated feature wilds are released onto the reels once there are no more wins on the reels. The feature wilds that form part of a win activate their respective feature while also remaining wild on the grid. These features include:

• Big – Expand a pay symbol into a 2×2 or 3×3 mega symbol. Any covered symbols are removed from the reels.
• Multiplying – Adds a multiplier value to all the wild symbols on the reels that have not formed part of a win.
• Random – Picks two to four pay symbols and replaces them with regular wilds.
• Removing – Removes all of the instances of the lowest paying symbol on the grid.
• Upgrading – Picks a random pay symbol on the reels and upgrades all instances of it on the grid.

Scatter Symbol

Scatter symbols unlock the Buggin free spins bonus. A minimum of three are needed to unlock the special feature, giving you seven free spins. You can also land super scatter symbols which will upgrade the bonus to super free spins. If you land another three scatter symbols during the free spins bonus, you add three bonus rounds to your tally. Should you hit a super scatter during regular free spins, the remaining spins are upgraded to super free spins.

Free Spins

Any wild symbols on the grid when free spins are activated turn sticky and remain so for the duration of the bonus rounds. If you upgrade to super free spins, all feature wilds in the wild inventory are locked and can be unlocked once they’re collected for the first time. In this case, the following free spin starts with a prefill and releases the unlocked feature wilds.

X-Iter

You can use the X-Iter feature to buy into different game modes, all of which have an RTP of 94%. These include:

• Bonus Hunt – Each round’s cost is increased by 3x to its original value, but you get a higher chance of triggering free spins.
• Two Feature Wilds – Pay 5x your stake for a spin with two feature wilds prefilled and released.
• Four Feature Wilds – Pay 10x your stake for a spin with four feature wilds prefilled and released.
• Bonus – Pay 100x your bet to access free spins immediately.
• Super Bonus – Pay 500x your bet to access super free spins immediately.

RTP & Volatility of Buggin Slot

Buggin doesn’t exactly hand out wins on every round, but volatility is clocked to a medium setting, which makes it way more accessible than titles with high settings. You can get two RTP versions of the game at 96% and 94%. I recommend playing at a casino that offers the 96% version which offers the best experience possible.

Buggin is developed by ELK Studios, one of the most well-regarded providers in the industry. So, you can rest assured that Buggin is a safe and trustworthy game to play with fair features and mechanics. I suggest playing it at an equally safe online casino with strong security features and licenses from trusted regulators like the MGA and UKGC.

Buggin Slot on Mobile

You can keep up with your vivarium on the go too, thanks to Buggin’s excellent mobile compatibility. The slot can be played on Android and iOS platforms, so you can fire up the game on a wide selection of tablets and smartphones. You get all the same graphics, features and win potential you’d get on the desktop version, so the experience is seamless across the board. The game automatically adapts to fit your screen size, moving elements of the interface around and adding touchscreen controls. You can play in both landscape and portrait modes.

Conclusion

I was hoping for Buggin to be a rather balanced, easy-going online slot machine, with its medium level of volatility and an excellent set of features. But the more I played, the more I realised just how unbalanced the math model is.

While wins come about often enough, the slot’s real potential is unlocked once you start stacking feature upon feature, building towards that 10,000x maximum win potential. But that’s easier said than done and for the most part, I ended up spending most of my time almost getting there, but never quite managing.

On the visual side of things, the game looks great and maintains the standard that ELK Studio has set over the years. It’s a rather cheerful animal theme, with a whimsical setting that works incredibly well together with subtle animations and a fitting soundtrack.

Ultimately, Buggin feels like a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there are loads of brilliant features, paired with great win potential and satisfying visuals. But the ingredients don’t quite mix all that well, and there’s a certain spark that the game seems to lack.