Double Bubble

For slots lovers, Gamesys Group is one of the most exciting new companies online. Launched in 2001, Gamesys immediately breathed fresh air into the industry with its flagship product Jackpot Joy. Jackpotjoy.com sets itself apart by offering all games in free mode, and by not being afraid to take chances. Gamesys’ games use an approach to interface and aesthetics that is truly distinct.

One of Jackpot Joy’s most popular slot games is Double Bubble. Double Bubble is a traditional slots game that distinguishes itself with a UI that is very fast and informative. The game has five reels, twenty pay lines, a wild symbol, a bonus symbol and a bonus game. The coin sizes range from 1p to £4, and the user can bet just one coin per line. So if a user put the maximum bet on all twenty lines, the overall wager would be £80.

The top jackpot is 20,000 coins, and each coin is equal to the wager. So if a player bet £4 on a line and hit, that line would worth £4 x 20,000 or £80,000. As multiline slot machines go, the player can actually hit on each line where they place a wager. So if a player placed the maximum bet on every line and hit them all — highly unlikely but possible — the jackpot would be worth £1.6M. The second-tier jackpot is just 500 coins, and the game calculates those coins the same way.

The biggest omissions on Double Bubble are free spins and a gamble feature. The gamble feature we can do without because it’s normally a bad bet anyway and we avoid it. The lack of free spins, however, diminishes the lucrativeness of this machine to a degree. Double Bubble pays out at a better rate than most similar machines, but the usual free spins help to offset that.

The Bubble Bonus symbol is essentially a scatter symbol, which means that it doesn’t have to appear in an enabled pay line in order to be active; it simply has to appear on reels 1, 3 and 5, at which point it launches the Bubble Pop bonus feature.

Bubble Pop is a simple game where the player selects one of three bubbles five times. Each bubble hides a multiplier of 1x, 2x, 3x or 4x. The player starts with a multiplier of 2x, and adds to that each of the five rounds. The game then pays out the total wager times the multiplier, and this is in addition to any other winnings. So if the bettor wagered the maximum £80 and achieved the maximum multiplier of 22x, the additional winnings would 22 x £80 or £1,760.

The game also has a second win area called the Bubble Line. Any time a symbol appears in a bubble, the game copies that symbol to the Bubble Line. When the Bubble Line fills up, if it forms a winning combination, the player wins the current coin size times the multiplier. The game determines the multiplier by starting with 2x and adding 1x for each pay line the user bet. So if the user bet all twenty lines, then the multiplier would be 22x.

Because of the lack of free spins, Double Bubble is not a perfect game. Nevertheless, it’s close. It’s a lot of fun and presents a number of options without being overly complex. It also has auto-play and adjustable speed, which makes it a tremendous option for the hardcore slots player who wants to move their bankroll as quickly as possible. It’s also plain, old-fashioned fun, so it’s not a bad way to kill an hour using the free mode.