Hot Fiesta: Slot Overview
Get ready to down tequilas and bust piñatas at Pragmatic
Play's Mexican-themed street party Hot Fiesta. With a name like that, you'd expect a
slot to raise the roof to produce all sorts of fiery entertainment. Unfortunately, the
rest of the game fails to follow through, and while Hot Fiestas has the technical
capabilities to dish up big wins, its emotion-free generic nature makes it hard to fall
for.
Confetti rains down on a non-descript 5-reel, 25-payline grid set amidst brightly
painted buildings in some warm, exotic destination. Just about every Mexican cliché
appears in this game that, unfortunately, lacks both finesse and charm. Hot Fiesta's
saving grace from an audio-visual standpoint is a foot-tapping groove to dance along to
or maybe break out in a cha-cha or just bob around depending on your confidence and
ability to bust a move.
The 5,000x win cap here isn't as exotic as the theme, but the
remaining stats are quite decent. The default RTP, for example, when betting without
the Ante Bet feature engaged is 96.56%, while high volatility means the game can go off
like a firecracker or fizzle if the fuse blows out. Remember though, Pragmatic Play RTP
is flexible, so depending on the casino you're playing on, this number can be
significantly lower. Getting all fiestery is possible on any device where base bets of
25 p/c toR$/€125 per spin are available.
Moseying through Hot Fiesta's paytable, we
find 11 regular pay symbols divided into low pay 10 to A card royals, and 6 premium
tiles. These are cocktails, maracas, guitars, accordions, a señorita, and a señor. Hit
a 5 of a kind win of high pay symbols rewards you with a prize worth 4 to 30 times your
stake.
Hot Fiesta: Slot Features
A purple piñata is wild, appearing on all reels to
substitute for any symbol except the bonus symbol. Wilds display a random multiplier of
x2, x3, or x5 which is applied to the prize value of any winning combinations they are
a part of. If there is more than one wild in a win, the values are added together
before being applied.
Symbols displaying a trio of fireworks are the scatters landing
on reels 1, 3, and 5. Hitting 3 at once triggers the free spins feature plus a win of
3x the bet. Before the round starts, a grid of 3x3 piñatas explodes one by one, each
revealing a different number which is tallied up to award 9 to 27 free spins.
During
the free spins round, all wild symbols that hit remain on the screen for the feature's
full duration. In between spins, these wilds shift to a new position on the board. Each
sticky roaming wild has a random multiplier of x2, x3, or x5, boosting any winning
combination they are involved with. Bonus symbols are not present during free spins, so
the feature cannot be retriggered.
Hot Fiesta doesn't come with a feature buy option,
but it has something similar called the Ante Bet. By increasing each paid spin cost by
40%, players double their chances of landing 3 scatters, thereby triggering free spins.
When Ante Bet is active, it decreases the RTP slightly to 96.53%.
Hot Fiesta: Slot
Verdict
Well, it's kind of hot, sort of fiestery, yet Hot Fiesta isn't a game that
feels like much love or sweat went into it. It's almost as if Pragmatic Play wasn't in
the mood to party. The music manages to keep the game alive for a while, though if you
fail to hit something decent quickly, it will be hard to stay motivated. Hot Fiesta
ticks the boxes, and there's nothing awful about it, but there's just too little to get
excited about as well. What you get on screen is a stock physical-ish-looking reel set
up, surrounded by formulaic Mexicana. It creates the impression of a studio not trying
very hard to impress.
The same can be said for the gameplay. Hot Fiesta remains stuck
in low gear a lot of the time and struggles to get the party going. The occasional wild
multiplier in the base game provides the odd thrill or two now and then. Free spins
step it up due to sticky roaming wilds, which multiply and can pound out satisfactory
wins. So much so that Pragmatic Play has limited the amount you can win in free spins
to 5,000 times the bet. Interestingly, having faced backlash in the community due to
their overexaggerated numbers which never seemed to come into realisation, the studio
has done this in a number of slots around the time of writing and appears to be their
go-to potential figure for now.
Technically, you can't fault Hot Fiesta, yet its
glaring lack of passion significantly reduces the fun factor. It also means Hot Fiesta
can't compete with bigger, better, more interesting Mexican slots like Extra Chilli
Megaways, Esqueleto Explosivo 2 or later releases like Wild Chapo or Wild Luchador, to
mention just a few.
In the end, Hot Fiesta is like one of those parties you feel
obligated to go to, then have one or two drinks before ducking out early to go home and
watch telly. It's okay for a while, but any longer would be tiresome, especially when
you know better fiestas are happening on the other side of town.
