Hyper Gold Slot – Free Demo

Chips, jackpots and a 25-line grid

So here it is, Gameburger Studios' Link&Win slot. The same studio is behind 9 Pots of Gold and Hyper Strike. It arrives with a gold theme, and at first look there's nothing that truly stands out as particularly novel; in fact, aside from the jackpot feature it seems as a rather rudimentary game. Wins are formed the ordinary way, three or more matching symbols on a payline running left to right from the leftmost reel. It is a Link&Win slot, however. When that round starts, every other symbol is cleared off the grid and only the triggering chips are held in place.

There are no big shocks in terms of features. A few items are worth noting nonetheless, and it contains 3 fixed jackpots - Mini, Minor and Major, the latter worth 750 times the stake - and a Mega jackpot of 5,000 times the stake. The Mini and Minor are reported at 50 and 150 times the stake. The jackpots sit on the chip symbols themselves, and the Link&Win round is activated when 6 or more chip symbols land on a single spin. The Mega is the one that asks for everything: chips have to occupy all 15 positions on the grid. Core to the game is the Link&Win bonus. Three spins run at the start of it, and the count goes back to three each time a further chip lands. That is where you'll discover nearly all of its potential. Only chips and blank spaces land while the round is running. There's an optional Win Booster bet for those reluctant to wait for more chips to fall organically. It plants extra Link&Win symbols onto the reels and raises the RTP from 96.08% to 96.33%.

Hyper Gold is a 5 reel slot with 3 rows per column and 25 paylines, and the minimum stake is 0.10 a spin. I played 310 spins of it at 20.00 a spin.

Ten free spins over a colossal block

There's one way of getting into the free spins. That's waiting for it to fall "organically", and if 3 scatters show up on reels 2 to 4 you will get 10 free spins and 1 times the stake on the trigger. Mine came 124 spins apart. The wait is the wait, because there's no bonus buy.

The goal in the bonus is rather taken out of your hands, and through the round reels 2, 3 and 4 combine into a single 3x3 colossal block. That block covers nine of the grid's fifteen positions. A retrigger grants a further 10 spins.

Where the 585% actually came from

Across 310 spins at a 20-credit stake the round appeared twice, on spin 154 and again on spin 278. The first paid 680.00, the second 720.00. On neither occasion was there a retrigger. Sixty of the 310 spins paid anything at all, and 29 of those returned less than the stake. The two of them paid 1,400 credits between them - 4% of everything won in the session, and the Link&Win round never fired at all. The sitting wagered 6,200.00 and won 36,284.00, a return of 585.2%. Not one spin landed the 6 chips it requires. The longest I went without a win of any kind was 23 spins, ending on spin 179.

Our Minty Verdict: The feature the game is named after sat out all 310 spins, and the free spins that did arrive contributed 4% of everything won - so the 585.2% return on this sitting is almost entirely one base-game spin, the 1,577.0 times the stake on spin 54. A grid that pays its ceiling only when chips fill all fifteen positions is going to spend most of its time not doing that.

One spin doing most of the work

In fact, Hyper Gold is a rather simple and uncomplicated slot with no big shocks or odd, convoluted features, and it all comes down to landing chip symbols in order to fill the grid for the Mega jackpot. My balance went from 100,000.00 to 130,084.00 over the 310 spins. But in turn you receive a bonus that in my session paid a fraction of what the base game did. It peaked at 131,312.00 on spin 180 and never dropped below 99,166.00. The session's largest hit, 1,577.0 times the stake on spin 54, arrived outside it. That one spin paid 31,540.00, more than every other win of the session put together.

The max win potential is quoted at 12,500 times the stake; it's a high variance slot.