Jingle Balls Review

As the name suggests, Jingle Balls adopts a Christmas theme, albeit with Nolimit City’s signature twisted humor. The visuals feature traditional Xmas-themed images like snow, gifts, elves and Santa, along with some sexually provocative imagery with strange-looking women and more! In a rather humorous twist, even the game’s soundtrack has Christmas carols… this time, with strange lyrics talking about Santa’s private parts!

The slot is played out over a 3-3-4-4-5-5 grid, with the number of rows increasing from left to right. In the base game, reels 5 and 6 start locked, incrementally unlocking when scatters land. With all reels unlocked during free spins, you can play the game with a whopping 614,656 ways to win! While the Christmas theme may sound positive, in the backdrop, you’ll see the software provider has chosen to keep the Gulag theme – and locked up work camps covered in snow can be seen during the base game, with a slightly merrier backdrop in the bonus round.

Betting starts at $0.20 per spin, ranging up to $200 per round, so players on all budgets are catered for here. Like in many of the game developer’s slots, there’s also an optional xBet multiplier that can be activated for a 50% stake increase; doing so boosts the chance of the bonus round landing, and also increases the RTP.

Despite the joyful aesthetics, make no mistake – Jingle Balls is an extremely volatile affair. The stats confirm as much, with a hit frequency of just once every 166 spins and 12,250X max payout only achievable once in 2.5 million rounds theoretically. In short, this slot can be as naughty as it is nice!

The theoretical RTP sits between 87.09% and 96.22% depending on the way you play (using the bonus buy mechanic, for example, offers a higher RTP) and, if you’re wanting a slot with high maximum win potential – you’ll be pleased to learn that Jingle Balls offers a max win of a whopping 12,250X!

Jingle Balls incorporates a cast of humorous holiday-themed symbols across its 6 reels, ranging from low-paying wrapped gifts to premium characters showcasing the cheeky side of Christmas. On the lower end, 5 gift box icons provide smaller rewards, paying out between 0.2 to 2 times your bet for 6 matching symbols. Christmas village staples like the Grinch, Rudolf, and an elf fill out the higher end – along with Mrs. Claus holding… balls!

Regarding payouts; landing 5 to 6 premium symbols awards a payout of between two and six times your stake, and there are also wild symbols in play, making it even easier for you to win.

When it comes to features, much remains the same as Gulag, with splitting wilds, extra wild reels and three free spins variants the order of the day. Nolimit City has really doubled down on making this title stand out from the slew of other Christmas slots flooding the market. The question is whether a refresh of Gulag with a Santa suit pulled over it provides enough justification as a brand new game.

Below, we will look at the different bonuses and features in the slot!

xWays

Landing xWays symbols on reels 1 or 2 in the base game (or reels 5 and 6 during Spirit Spins) sets the expanding reels in motion. xWays icons that land display as 2×2 or 3×3 tiles, revealing a random main symbol underneath. All xWays symbols then turn into that same symbol, effectively expanding ways with more matching icons.

Plus, if multiple xWays land, they’ll all transform into the same symbol chosen by the first, stacking identical symbols for even more ways. This makes xWays essential for laying foundations for the game’s more lucrative feature.

xNudge Wilds 

When xNudge Wilds land on reels 3 or 4, they bring a vertical nudge effect and increase wild multipliers. xNudge Wilds always land partially visible, with the top or bottom clipped off. Once landed, they nudge up or down to fill the entire reel and lock in place.

Each single nudge increases an attached multiplier by +1. So, if two nudges are needed to fill the reel, the wild’s multiplier will reach x3. Having more xNudge symbols also boosts overall multiplier power, as separate values are added together – another plus, in our eyes.

xSplit Wilds: A Nolimit City Specialty

Landing xSplit Wilds (standard wilds can also appear) is pretty important for gameplay, as it is in most Nolimit City slots. During the base game, these wilds can land on reels five and six – and during the bonuses and features, they can land on reels one and two. xSplit Wilds trigger upon landing and split all other symbols to the left and right. This cloning effect doubles existing symbols to make even more ways to win! Plus, when xSplit Wilds land to the right of scatters specifically, they trigger unique reactions:

• Scatter Symbols – Transformed into full reel wilds
• xWays Symbols – Split value is doubled 
• xNudge Wilds – Adds an extra wild reel

The key, in our opinion, is the positioning of these wilds. If they land in the best places, more wilds can be added, and more reels – and, with extra wilds and additional ways in the mix alongside standard symbol doubling, xSplit can deliver insane multiplying action.

Free Spins Features: Look Out For Those Scatter Symbols

Like bonus rounds in most online casino games, the real win potential in Jingle Balls can be found in a main free spins bonus round. Landing 3 or more scatters grants access to one of three free spins rounds: Spirit Spins, which requires three scatter symbols, Spirit Spins: All Aboard, which required four scatters, and Spirit Spins: Double Joy, which requires you to land five scatter symbols anywhere in view.

In all three of the free spin bonuses, the playing grid changes to 5-5-4-4-3-3 with all reels now unlocked permanently. A set-up spin first takes place displaying multipliers awarded to premium symbols and the number of spins you’ll be awarded.

Spirit Spins see one randomly selected premium symbol gain a starting multiplier value. Spirit Spins: All Aboard has multipliers applied to all high symbols. Finally, Spirit Spins: Double Joy doubles the multiplier values of the previous two versions.

An additional reel at the top of the grid then periodically triggers, either boosting existing multipliers, doubling them, or adding +1 or +2 to the count. Collecting more scatters also further awards one spin per scatter.

Hitting 3 additional scatters in the initial Spirit Spins round also upgrades the feature to Spirit Spins: All Aboard and turns on multipliers for all character symbols. This makes retriggering free rounds with more scatters key to unlocking the slot’s maximum potential.

As is the case with almost all Nolimit City games, the key to winning big is landing wild symbols, forming winning combinations from the leftmost reel, and looking for the character symbols on the reels. When you play the Jingle Balls slot at online casinos, you’ll also want to try to activate Spirit Spins’ higher bonuses, as these bonus features are more lucrative thanks to the wild multiplier – and bring you one step closer to hitting that max win!

Bonus Buys

Rather than waiting indefinitely for one of the free spins rounds to hit naturally, Nolimit City has built in a special Bonus Buy feature that lets you instantly trigger their bonus round of your choice. If you want to buy the standard Spirit Spins round, you can do so for a cost of 60X your base game stake – pretty reasonable, we feel.

You can also purchase entry into the ‘super’ bonuses. The All Aboard and Double Joy spins can both be purchased for costs of 270X and 486X respectively. While it’s still pretty expensive – especially when compared to the prices we saw just a few years ago, where a bonus buy of more than 100X was virtually unheard of – it’s actually pretty reasonable for a Nolimit City slot!

Alternatively, a Lucky Draw entry is on offer, too, something we’ve also seen in a number of other Nolimit City slots. This costs 187.2X your base game stake, and one of the three free spins bonus rounds will be randomly awarded – letting you, potentially, win the top bonus, for a reduced cost.

So, while Christmas slots tend to have reasonably predictable features, Nolimit City has made Jingle Balls anything but. The locked reel mechanic itself provides plenty of big win potential even before considering the win multipliers, extra wilds and free spin enhancements – and if you can activate Spirit Spins, or the other bonuses and features, you stand a solid chance of hitting big wins – although you’ll have to be very lucky to hit the max win, as it’s worth a staggering 12,500X your bet!

The Spirit Spins: Double Joy bonus round is where most max win multiplier hits will happen, we imagine. However, like many Nolimit City releases, the Jingle Balls slot likely can produce max win hits in the base game, too – so you don’t have to rely on the Double Joy bonus round to win big!

While on the surface, the Jingle Balls slot may look like a lighthearted Christmas-themed slot, its extreme volatility and massive max payout potential reveal a much more complex game than you might initially think. Of course, this is nothing new for Nolimit City; they’re known for their complex games, filled with rich (albeit crazy) story lines and huge win potential – but with this, comes volatility, and the potential for long losing streaks, so it’s important to keep this in mind.

While it’s largely a modified reskin of Remember Gulag, the game actually has a different math model; the max win in Remember Gulag, for example, was 50,000X, while the Jingle Balls slot offers “just” 12,500X. Still, some players will see this as a more achievable win – and that’s always a good thing. It’s also a pretty unique theme, and if you ever wanted to combine the Soviet’s death camps with Christmas… Well, we suppose you’ve now got your wish!

While we doubt this will be massively popular outside of the holiday season, it’s a decent effort from Nolimit City – and we would expect it to get some pretty serious play-time this December!