Babushkas Thunderkick

Babushkas is a 5-reel, 17 fixed pay line slot which is brought to you by Thunderkick. As usual playable from $0.10 per spin, you can spin the reels across all platforms. It's based on a Russian doll theme and features wilds, 4 symbol upgrade features and a bonus feature of free spins with guaranteed wilds.

Babushkas is very unusual like compare to other Thunderkick slots. Based on the dolls themes which decrease in size and are placed one insider another I think I have one of these toys at home. Colourful and featuring 7 dolls.

Babushkas features bears that will charm, scare and dance with you. The less clothes, the better the rewards. These bears will do anything to undress you. Watch out for the wild egg symbol which appears on the middle reel only. When a star is revealed, it may randomly trigger 1of 3 Bear Mystery features:
- You have the scare bear feature – The lowest value symbol on the reels will be upgraded. This may happen up to 3 times, depending on the size of the bear.
- The charm bear feature where all symbols on the reels will be upgraded by 1 level once only.
- Finally, the dance bear will rewards you with 7 free spins. During the feature, a new wild egg will appear on reel 3 for each free spin. This gives you the chance to trigger 1 of the 3 Bear features.

If you manage to get 15 symbols all the same on the reels once all win symbol upgrades have taken place, they will upgrade once more after pays are awarded, this is known as a wipe win. All symbols transform to a ghost type of a symbol giving you a total of x100 your stake.

I was not a fan of this slot trying to understand it but started to like it. I played it mostly in the videoslots battle of the slots, but hardly in my personal capacity.

Thunderkick have quite a nack for finding interesting ways of representing slot machine reels - just look at games like Birds on a Wire or Esqueleto Explosivo and you'll see what I mean straight away! No surprise then to find that this crazy machine featuring Russian dolls that pop out of their casings to become smaller and smaller for a chance at bigger wins is another of their creations.

It's a really nice idea for a slot machine but I have to say that despite having played a couple of thousand spins through the game now I'm still never 100% sure when I should be getting a "symbol upgrade" whereby all dolls of a certain color will change to the next doll in the chain. This can be fun because sometimes you win much more than you expect, but it can also be a little annoying never quite knowing where you are with the game and reading the instructions and paytable didn't really clear things up fully either. Perhaps I'm easily confused, I don't know!

There's so much symbol upgrading going on in a whole bunch of different scenarios that it's not too surprising to find the games paytable looks extremely poor at first glance, but you do often win on a large number of the games 17 paylines at once so it isn't quite as bad as it may seem.

Babushka, those cute little dolls so popular in Russia, have only seen a few slot games based on them. My last play on a Babushka-themed game was from Russia with Love, a Playtech game. With a Russian background music, the gameplay was quite okay, but the Free Spins games were always better. Choose the Babushka dolls correctly and you'll end up with lots of free spins, more than 40 spins if I'm not mistaken, regardless of whether it was triggered by 3, 4 or even 5 Scatter symbols. That gave plenty of winning chances even at the minimum starting bet per spin.

I was browsing my favourite casino, Casumo, when I saw this Babushkas game under the New Games category. My first thought was...'hey, this looks like a Thunderkick game, by the look of the game icons'. Sure enough, it was, and I didn't waste any time to try it out with my deposit. I was quite surprise by Thunderkick's sudden release of a few new games all at once. Maybe they are feeling the pinch of being left out by most players, so they quickly got some new games going. But this can only be a good thing for all parties concerned, players included.

This new game, Babushkas, bears that distinctive graphics and quality mark inherent of Thunderkick games - simple, clean, yet attractive iconic presentations, all with muted pastel colours which aren't so vibrant but very pleasing nonetheless. The Wild symbol is a true blue dumb Wild symbol I'm afraid, because it does not pay nor do anything else besides substituting for all symbols. In the base game, a Special Wild may appear on reel 3, designated by a 'star' in the icon itself, and triggers one of the three Bonus games, namely the Scare Bear, the Charm Bear or the Dance Bear feature game.

In the Scare Bear game, all lowest symbols on the reels get upgraded, up to 3 times. In the Charm Bear game, all symbols on the reels get upgraded one time. In the Dance Bear game, all players get to dance, that's because 7 free spins are awarded, with a Wild symbol on reel 3 for every spin. If this doesn't make you dance, oh boy, something must be wrong with your butts, hehehe. If all 15 symbols are matched after upgrading, that's a Wipe Win, and one more upgrade respin is awarded. If all 15 highest symbol are matched, a special 100x total bet win is awarded. Having said all that, looking at the paytable may widened your eyes, or make them squint. The highest paying symbol pays 2x the total bet for 5 of them, whilst the lowest paying symbol pays 0.4x. Argh! This paytable is almost identical to that of The Wild Chase by Play'nGo, and are the lowest values I have come across so far!

Okay, so the symbols pay horribly low, the paytable is doing a low limbo, but the game plays quite okay, as far I know. Now this is a good thing within a bad thing - that a damn low paytable can still offer good decent wins, plus an enjoyable gameplay at the same time. Yep, just like The Wild Chase too, which I didn't like at all at first, but then liked it after more plays on it. I'm sure Babushkas will do the same for you too.