Blazing Mammoth XL: Slot Overview
Back in the day, like back back in the day, a successful mammoth takedown must have been quite a cause for celebration. Forget about ordering a bucket of chicken for the Saturday night family feast; a mammoth would have been able to feed a lot of hungry mouths. Not to mention all the other resources gleaned from the animal – fur for coats, bones for hitting your enemies, and so on. They were big beasts, and to honour their bulk, Games Global partner Pear Fiction Studios has come up with Blazing Mammoth XL, a bigger and woollier sequel to the 2021 release Blazing Mammoth.
One thing we can say about the original Blazing Mammoth, it was an eye-catching slot, as its makers had imbued the artwork with a chunky, pleasing appearance. Indeed, this is a common thread running through a lot of Pear Fiction Studios' work, whether we're dealing with ice-age animals or grandmothers fighting zombies. Thundering visuals help take the edge off the fact we're ploughing through another 9 Masks game, and the increased prize values reinforce the goodwill enough to keep on ploughing.
As well as instant prizes, the other method for collecting cash is hitting winning ways. Blazing Mammoth XL's game grid is expandable, though, in its resting size, it's got 5 reels, 3 rows and 243 ways to win. When expanded to its full size, up to 7,776 ways to win become available. Designed with three RTP configurations, the default return value is 96%, and the math model is highly volatile. With five bonus buys to choose from, players may select bets of 20p/c to £/€50.
Five-of-a-kind winning ways are optimal, and when they are made up of the J, Q, K, or A card ranks, the rewards are 0.6 to 0.8 times the bet. When consisting of 5 wolves, woolly rhinos, bears, or saber-tooth tigers, players collect 2 to 4 times their bet. Wild symbols substitute for any regular pay symbol, and when wilds are part of a win in free spins, they reveal a random ways multiplier of up to x100, which gets added to the round's way multiplier.
Blazing Mammoth XL: Slot Features
Being an XL version means players can expect some adjustments to the gameplay compared to the last game. The main goal remains landing enough mammoth symbols to collect a decent prize, but there is a variety of mammoth symbols now. There are also free spins and a buy feature.
Instant Mammoth Jackpots SwiftHits
Placed next to the gaming grid is Blazing Mammoth XL's ladder of prizes. Landing 3 to 12 mammoth SwiftHits symbols awards 1x to 5,000x the bet. This time there are 3 mammoth symbols - a regular and 2 special ones:
- Respin Mammoth – when this symbol lands, it locks in place, and the selected reel spins again, landing new symbols.
- Split Mammoth – when this symbol lands, up to 3 additional symbols are added to the reel. One reel can be split to a maximum of 6 symbols.
Free Spins
The free spins symbol is the scatter, and hitting 3 of them triggers a spin on the Free Spin Wheel. The Free Spin Wheel awards a random number of free spins from 8 to 15 and a random ways multiplier of x2 to x8. The awarded ways multiplier applies to all wins within free spins except any Instant Mammoth Jackpots. When a win occurs during the round that includes a wild, the ways multiplier is increased by the value displayed on the wild. Free spins can be retriggered.
Buy Feature
Blazing Mammoth XL's buy feature supplies 5 buy options. These are random free spins and random multiplier for 53.75x the bet, 8 free spins with an x2 multiplier for 41.25x the bet, 10 free spins with an x3 multiplier for 58.35x the bet, 12 free spins with an x5 multiplier for 84.65x the bet, or 15 free spins with an x8 multiplier for 137.35x the bet.
Blazing Mammoth XL: Slot Verdict
Blazing Mammoth numero uno was basically a replay of Pear Fiction Studios' popular slot 9 Masks of Fire, and given the masses of these games on the market now, excitement levels weren't exactly going off the Richter at the prospect of another one. Even an XL version. No offence to Blazing Mammoth XL's makers but after playing so many of these kinds of games, what else is left to see?
On the bright side, Pear Fiction Studios must be fully aware of the situation since it has made an effort to add novel thrills to Blazing Mammoth XL. A bit of expanding reel activity, respins, some multiplying action, and a thundering presentation are all positive additions that help keep players on their toes. The win multiplier actually did a great job of equalising the game, so the emphasis wasn't as much on scoring instant prizes as usual. Build a big multiplier, and regular wins in free spins might be surprisingly good.
Still not sure if when you add everything up that it all warrants an XL label, though. Maybe if Pear Fiction had loosened the max win of 5,000x the bet, the title would have been more convincing. Certainly, if big potential is what you're after in one of these scatter symbol instant prize games, there are larger options. 11 Enchanting Relics, Emerald Gold, or Western Gold are three which bubbled up as comparisons.
Bigger doesn't always mean better, though, and like Push Gaming's contribution 10 Swords, Blazing Mammoth XL might not be the biggest example of these games around, despite what the title says, but players excited by instant scatter prize win slots can thank Pear Fiction Studios for providing one of the more exciting interpretations of the format to try.
