Fishin' Frenzy Megaways The Big Catch Slot – Free Demo

The Fisherman comes back with an upgrade

Fishin' Frenzy Megaways The Big Catch is yet another Megaways slot in Reel Time Gaming's Fishin' Frenzy line to come tumbling off the assembly line, and it employs an angling theme to fold in a bunch of ingenious features, symbols, and gameplay. I ran 450 spins on it at a 2.00 stake, starting from a balance of 1,000.00. It's not without precedence. The Megaways engine underneath is licensed from Big Time Gaming. It shares several elements with Fishin' Frenzy Megaways, the free spins round in particular, and both assign the Fisherman the task of collecting fish values, for example. The difference here is what happens once four Fishermen have been collected. The Big Catch does more than enough to shake off its forerunners and stand on its own feet, despite the resemblances. My session ended at 464.00, a return of 40.4% on the money put through.

For starters, the backdrop is an agreeable one, and The Big Catch places you out on the water with rod and reel. When you are finished admiring the scenery, open the stake selector to choose a wager. Whatever it reads when the scatters land is the stake the entire free spins round is settled at.

On each spin, symbols fall into six reels that carry up to 5 symbols apiece. A counter above the reels tracks that total live; on one captured 2.00 spin it read 3,600 ways. So the count of ways to win shifts around from spin to spin up to a ceiling of 15,625, and wins are built left to right on neighbouring reels. Matches begin at two of a kind, and any fish symbol counts as a match for any other fish. Every payout is multiplied by your stake. Scatter wins are added on top of whatever the reels pay.

Assisting is the wild symbol, which drops on reels 2 to 6 only. Only the highest win on each line is paid. It will not substitute for the scatter or the bonus symbol. A trigger therefore needs three genuine scatters on screen.

Inside the Big Catch round

The base game has the occasional moment. On the frame I captured, two ways of fish across the first three reels returned 4.00 on a 2.00 stake, the readout reading 2 ways = 4.00.

Things can turn frantic during the Free Spins Bonus, which comes into play when 3 or more Bonus Scatters land anywhere in view, and the bonus game dispenses free spins according to how many scatters triggered it:

3 scatters: 10 free spins.
4 scatters: 15 free spins.
5 scatters: 25 free spins.
6 scatters: 50 free spins.

Once the round is in motion the Fisherman becomes live, and he stands in for all symbols. Each Fisherman in view collects from all Fish in view, so a spin carrying two of them takes the board twice. He collects the prize value of every Fish in view. Nothing is handed over mid-round; the accumulated total is awarded once the spins are used up. Those values span x2, x5, x10, x15, x20, x25 and x50. My first bonus came on spin 39 from three scatters, ran the 10 free games that award, and paid 56.00, or 28.0 times the stake.

There is one more twist to bear in mind. This is The Big Catch upgrade, and every 4 Fishermen you collect pushes the fish up one size and adds 5 free spins, all the way up to the Big Fish. The second bonus landed on spin 408 and paid 106.00, 53.0 times the stake, moving the balance from 423.20 to 527.20.

Our Minty Verdict: The upgrade is the whole reason this instalment exists, and it is also the reason a round can run long enough to matter — four Fishermen collected, one size up on the fish, five more spins on the counter, repeated until the Big Fish. My two rounds paid 162.00 of the 364.00 the session won, against a stated ceiling of 50,000 times the total bet.

Two bonuses in 450 spins

There is no denying that The Big Catch shares components with Fishin' Frenzy The Big Catch and the rest of the line. The Fisherman is a scatter that does nothing at all until the free spins begin. The free spins round is perhaps the most closely matched, and the Fisherman collecting fish values is identical conceptually. There were 369 spins between my first bonus and my second. And yet it truly doesn't matter when The Big Catch is doing its thing; the star of the show is the upgrade, each fourth Fisherman collected enlarging the fish and drawing the round out by another 5 spins.

These Megaways slots usually work best amid hectic chain reactions of wins and features. My best base-game spin was 22.00 on spin 41, 11.0 times the stake, and it lifted the balance to its high of 1,009.40. The Fisherman is the central figure in most, if not all, of these moments. Away from the two bonuses the next largest returns were 16.40 on spin 251 and 8.40 on spin 446.

The base game can plod at times: my 450-spin session paid on only 74 spins, went 29 spins without a win at one point, and returned 364.00 of the 900.00 staked. Thirty-two of those 74 paying spins came back below the 2.00 stake, and the low point of the session was 423.20. The two bonuses I saw peaked at 53 times the stake.