Jelly Multihops: Slot Overview

It’s odd how you can move through everyday life barely noticing something, and then the moment it’s pointed out, it suddenly seems to pop up everywhere. There’s even a term for that effect: the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, named after a German terrorist organisation from the 1970s. For example, if a friend mentions they’re thinking about buying a red motorbike, it can feel like from then on the roads are packed with red motorbikes. There are scientific reasons behind this mental bias, but we’re short on space, so we’ll leave it there for now. Maybe another time.

In any case, that’s kind of what we were experiencing during this review. At the time, scatter-paying/pay-anywhere slots felt like they were absolutely everywhere. Wherever you looked, you’d eventually run into a game that paid out as long as enough matching symbols appeared anywhere on the grid. Here’s another entry, this time from Red Tiger associates Max Win Gaming, called Jelly Multihops – a game set somewhere out in the vast universe where everything is strange and delightful. On this planet, jelly-like beings bounce onto a gaming grid framed by a plasticky-looking exploration outpost, all under an alien, exotic purple night sky.

Jelly Multihops runs on a 7×7-sized gaming matrix, with 49 mostly jellified symbols dropping in each round. Bets of 20 p/c to $/€10 can be staked per paid drop. It’s a highly volatile title, with a default RTP of 96.23%, increasing to 96.43% when using the bonus buy option, priced at 100x the bet. In both the base game and the bonus round, the main aim is to land at least 13 matching symbols anywhere on the grid to score a win. Matches don’t have to touch, and they don’t need to begin from any particular position.

All pay symbols in Jelly Multihops are offbeat, adorable, jelly-styled creatures with a Reactoonz-ish vibe. From low to high value, they come in orange, green, light blue, darker blue, purple, pink, and reddy orange. They return 0.1 to 2 times the bet for a 13-14 OAK scatter win, or 6 to 50 times the bet when 21+ matching symbols are visible. The wild symbol substitutes for all paying symbols, which is a fairly bold choice in a scatter-pays game, and it can also receive multipliers. The rules don’t spell it out clearly, but wilds only appeared to show up through the Random Wild feature.

Jelly Multihops: Slot Features

The extra mechanics in Jelly Multihops discussed here are cascading wins, the Multiplier Grid, Random Wild, and free spins.

Cascading Wins

Any symbol that forms part of a scatter win in the base game or bonus round is removed from the reels. The gaps left behind are then filled by new symbols dropping from above, and the cycle repeats whenever another scatter win is created.

Random Wild

The Random Wild activates randomly in the base game. A Multiplier Grid shows up underneath the standard symbols, with each position displaying a numerical value. The wild symbol takes one of the values, and when winning symbols disappear, the wild leaps to one of the empty positions and adds the value printed there to its multiplier value. Wilds remain in play for the full duration of a cascade chain.

Free Spins

Hitting 4 bonus symbols grants 8 free spins. Prior to each spin, the Random Wild feature is activated. The wild’s multiplier carries through the cascades within a single spin, but it resets again between free spins.

Jelly Multihops: Slot Verdict

After spending some time with Jelly Multihops, it felt decent enough. Not a standout, not something that’s going to send players digging up long-lost friends on dusty old social networks to convince them to try it, but not a bad experience either. It has a couple of interesting twists on the scatter-pays/win-anywhere style, so fans of that format may still want to give it a spin.

There are a few quirks too, even if they’re not huge. For starters, it takes quite a lot of symbols to land even the smallest scatter win. In many games of this type, a payout can start from 8 matching symbols on screen. That’s not to say Jelly Multihops necessarily pays less frequently or anything like that, especially since the official hit rate wasn’t provided. Still, it felt less straightforward to quickly spot likely wins compared to an 8+ OAK setup. On the plus side, wins seemed to roll into longer cascade chains during Random Wild triggers, which was enjoyable, though that’s purely anecdotal, so don’t hold us to it. In any case, the 12+ OAK approach in Jelly Multihops doesn’t appear to limit the upside, with the maximum win stated as 10,000 times the bet.

Another positive is that Jelly Multihops didn’t come across as a Sweet Bonanza clone. And while multipliers are central to making the game tick, it didn’t feel like Gates of Olympus either – two scatter-win titles (both, coincidentally, from Pragmatic Play) that have effectively become reference points for other games in the genre. So yes, there are a couple of minor issues, and the theme feels a bit undercommitted, but there’s also enough going on to keep Jelly Multihops interesting, making it a solid, if not exceptional, addition to the fast-expanding scatter win category.