La Bomba Introduction

To start with, yes, the theme is a very strange pick. And you can’t help wondering what came first: the concept of mixing bombs, girls and Mexico into a slot, or the pun on La Bamba. To crank up the silliness even more, mice carrying Molotovs dash across the screen and then explode halfway through. Supposedly, the “plot” (if it deserves that label) takes place in the drowsy village of San Perezoso and revolves around the main character, miss Guadalupe. She’s a girl who enjoys playing with bombs—quite literally. Whether that makes her a terrorist or simply a pyromaniac is never really clarified.

La Bomba, a 5-reel, 25 payline video slot available on all devices from €0.25, is yet another joint project between Canadian developer Side City Studios and NextGen Gaming. If you’ve been around our site for a while, you’ll know we’re not particularly fond of these collaborations, since they too often end up going off the rails.

La Bomba Symbols & Features

Ugh, these paytables! We genuinely don’t understand why so many studios keep using this outdated approach that effectively misleads players. “Payline and scatter wins are multiplied by the coin value.” What!? Which coin value? Where is it shown? How is it applied? This kind of nonsense feels less like “tradition” and more like a way to make terrible payouts look better than they really are.

The paytable is rough—both in appearance and in substance. The symbols include cartoon-style cherry bombs, dynamite, Molotovs, powder kegs, cacti, plants, bells, and Señora Guadalupe, with the top character paying 20 times the stake for 5 across a payline. None of the symbols are stacked on the reels, and with very little happening in the base game, it can be a pretty miserable play.

The wild is a bomb, or the BOMBA symbol as the game calls it. It shows up only on reels 2, 3 and 4 and becomes a key part of the gameplay, as you’ll see.

La bomba Free Spins

The free games feature starts when you land 3 BOMBA symbols on the middle three reels, awarding 5 free spins. The free spins mode works a little differently than what you might be used to. The win you get when you trigger the feature is shown above the reels like this:

• Reel 2 shows the amount won when triggering the free spins, for example, €15.
• Reel 3 shows the amount won times 2, in our case €30.
• Reel 4 shows the amount won times 3, in our case €45.

Then, every time a BOMB symbol lands on any of the middle reels, the value displayed above that reel is paid out. On top of that, 2 BOMB symbols give 1 extra free spin, while landing 3 awards 2 additional free spins.

In practice, the free spins round is essentially a cash-prize style bonus with the possibility of plenty of retriggers—which you’ll likely need if you want to leave with a respectable win.

La Bomba Conclusion

It’s difficult to pin down the true potential of this slot, since there doesn’t seem to be any cap on how many times the free games can retrigger. If you were to trigger the bonus with a 5 of a kind top symbol together with the 3 wild symbols required to start it, there’s actually scope for solid wins in the region of 3-400 times the stake per spin. Still, it’s not exactly encouraging that you have to rely on such a rare scenario to have a real chance at a meaningful payout.

That said, the free spins feature did appear fairly often, showing up at roughly 1 per 60 spins or so (though we may simply have hit a lucky stretch). The best bonus we saw returned just under 100 times the stake. It might be worth a spin if you’re tired of playing nothing but ultra-high variance slots, but there are far more enjoyable games out there than La Bomba.