Bigger Bass Blizzard - Christmas Catch (Pragmatic Play) Slot Review

Bigger Bass Blizzard – Christmas Catch: Slot Overview

When Pragmatic released Big Bass Bonanza on the 14^th of December 2020, the slot machine quickly became a favourite amongs players. Following up on the success Big Bass Bonanza earned, Pragmatic decided to release new machines on this theme and released Bigger Bass Bonanza on the 16^th September 2021.

While Bigger Bass Bonanza’s release was a huge success aswell, Pragmatic Play decided to bring some entries in this franchise quicker. They released a Big Bass Bonanza Megaways version just shorty after on the 18^th November 2021. On top Pragmatic Play released Christmas Big Bass Bonanza on the 2^nd of December 2021. Christmas Big Bass Bonanza was the original Big Bass Bonanza with a christmas theme and a feature buy option. While the Christmas version came with a feature buy, everything else like the RTP or hitrate stayed the same. In 2022 Pragmatic added other versions to the franchise. With Big Bass Splash and Big Bass – Keeping it Reel, we have a huge portfolio of different Big Bass games already.

Bigger Bass Blizzard – Christmas Catch is the next entry in this saga, fitting for the holidays released on November 28th 2022. As some already expect, Bigger Bass Blizzard is the christmas edition of the original Bigger Bass Bonanza with a feature buy option. It is exactly what Pragmatic did the year prior with the original Big Bass Bonanza and the christmas edition. But without further ado, lets have a look on the new release and what exactly changed in Bigger Bass Blizzard.

Bigger Bass Blizzard – Christmas Catch: Stats and Special Symbols

The Slot Machine has a 5 Reels 4 Rows layout and is played on 12 fixed paylines. There is a freespins feature that can be triggered by landing 3 or more scatters. Landing 3, 4 or 5 Scatters will achieve 10, 15 or 20 freespins respectively. There is also a random chance that if you only land two scatters you might get a fishing rod hook feature that changes a reel to land a third scatter.

Since this is a fishing and christmas themed slot, the higher symbols and the game sounds are also based on that theme. In the normal edition of this machine there is a boat symbol that got changed to the fisherman now driving a snowmobile. This is the „best“ premium symbol and pays 200 times the bet if you land a 5 of the mon a payline. Otherwise there are no major changes to the original Big Bass symbols, as an example, the fishing rod lure is now placed into a small hole of a frozen sea underground. Of course there are also the royals from 10 to A as the low symbols, but those does not got a christmas change. The basegame background music comes in a slow christmas style type, that intensifies when the player lands a big win or triggers the freespins bonus. In that case there is a lot of chimes and bells added to the sounds which can be a little too much.

Beside the scatter symbols to trigger freespins, the most important symbols are the fishes. The fishes come with a cash price attached on them which is mostly relevant for the bonus, but a five of a kind of fish symbols will also achieve the prices that are attached on them. This gets interesting since the fishes carry between 2x to 4000x the initial bet, hence you could get the max win of 4000x on a line hit in the basegame

All of this is exactly the same as Bigger Bass Bonanza, so lets have a look on the actual changes to the normal edition of this slot. As mentioned Bigger Bass Blizzard comes with a feature buy option. The player can choose to pay 100x the betsize to make a spin that guarantees to land atleast 3 but up to 5 scatter symbols. The buy freespins option has almost the same RTP as the basegame, with 96.07% it is only lower by 0.01%. The second change for the christmas edition is that the player is now able to activate an ante bet. The ante bet will increse the initial betsize by 50% and will give you more scatters for that extra bet. Usually the RTP changes slightly while playing with an ante bet on most games, Bigger Bass Blizzard however works with the exact same RTP of 96.08% no matter if the ante bet is activated or not.

Bigger Bass Blizzard – Christmas Catch – Freespins Bonus feature

The freespins bonus gets triggered if the player lands atleast 3 scatters in view. Depending if the bonus got triggered with 3, 4 or 5 scatters, the player will achieve 10, 15 or 20 spins respectively when the bonus starts. While in the freespins feature, there are no scatters on the reels but a new fisherman symbol makes up for that. If the player lands a fisherman symbol, all fishes on the reels will get collected and the player achieves the attached prices as the win, in adittion to any linehits. The fisherman symbol also substitutes as a wild symbol for every other symbol to make linehits easier to achieve.

The more exciting part is the fisherman trail that is active in the freespins. For every fisherman the player lands on the reels the fisherman trail will get one step added. There are 3 levels to achieve on the fisherman trail and each of the levels need 4 fisherman to be landed.

The first level will achieve you an additional 10 freespins and a fisherman multiplier of x2. The second level will achieve you an additional 10 freespins and a fisherman multiplier of x3. And after you landed 12 fisherman in total you unlock level 3 on the trail which achieves 10 additional freespins and a fisherman multiplier of x10. What needs to be mentioned is that the fisherman multiplier will only multiply the fish catch winnings and no line hits where the symbol substitutes as a wild. Also pretty important is the fact that the stages activate one after another only after you run out of spins. In short, no matter how fast you land the fisherman 12 times, you will always get 10 spins at the end with the 10x multiplier.

A little extra feature is the fishing rod hook, it might happen that up to two hooks will change the reels after a spin to land 1 or 2 fisherman that weren’t there before. Also the other way around 1 or 2 fisherman on the reels that come without any fish prices might randomly add fishes on the reels with a dynamite cutscene.

As the Bigger Bass Blizzard is capped at 4000x the betsize, it doesnt matter on which multiplier you land the 4000x fish.

Bigger Bass Blizzard – Christmas Catch: Conclusion

While Bigger Bass Blizzard is nice to have as a feature buy slot for Bigger Bass Bonanza, it is a sad thing to see that Pragmatic Play lowered the RTP for this release. While nothing changed from Bigger Bass Bonanza to the christmas edition of it except the bonus buy option, we face a significant decrease of RTP this time.

The original Bigger Bass Bonanza RTP was 96.71% and is now lowered to 96.07% even with ante bet activated. So we can only recommend this machine to anyone who wants to buy the Bigger Bass Bonanza freespins, for the basegame we would go back to the original since there is nothing extra that Bigger Bass Blizzard offers to justify the decreased RTP. Bigger Bass Blizzard – Christmas Catch is almost an entire reskin of the machine that it is based on, so we have more excitement for future releases that might add new stuff into this franchise.