Hot Rod Racers: Slot Overview

Drop the wrench for a bit; software provider Relax Gaming is coming at you with an automobile-themed slot that goes by the name of Hot Rod Racers. Around the time of writing, there had already been a couple of high-performance car slot releases such as Road Rage and Mad Cars; now, it's a Relax Gaming slot that's going to have its bodywork and engine inspected. Okay, enough with the car references (for now). What we've been circling around introducing is an online slot featuring muscle cars, Wheelspin Wilds – which are sticky in free spins, a progressive multiplier aspect, and a couple of bonus buy options.

Hot Rod Racers' base game is held in a workshop stacked to the rafters with automobiles in various states of repair. All are brightly coloured muscle cars that are aching to be let loose on a stretch of asphalt, with no one else in sight, so drivers can put their foot down to see what all the tuning up has resulted in. A rather passionate rock track has been layered over the top, as if blasted from an old plastic stereo in the corner of a workshop, covered in dust, while a room full of mechanics tinker away at cars, polishing this, tweaking that, squeezing out every last ounce of horsepower possible.

It's hard to pick many holes in the machine beneath Hot Rod Racers, provided you're the sort of gambler who favours highly volatile rides. Standard RTP comes in at 96%, rising to an even 97% when buying either of the bonus rounds. Playable on any device, users can select a bet of 10 p/ to $/€40 per spin before metaphorically hitting the ignition by pressing the spin button.

Doing so sets the 5-reel game grid in motion. Each reel holds 4 symbols each, with 30 paylines for hitting winning combinations of three to five of a kind across. Winning lines must start from the first reel and land on consecutive reels to qualify. Starting the pay table off are diamonds, hearts, clubs, and spades, worth 2.5x the bet for five of a kind, then blue, green, red, and purple hot rods as the four premiums, where a five-symbol premium win will get you 5-10x the bet. Right, let's buckle up for the good bits.

Hot Rod Racers: Slot Features

First up is Wheelspin Wilds, which are present on reels 2-5. Wheelspin Wilds can substitute for any regular pay symbol, and when they hit, they transform any high-paying car symbols to the left of them into wilds. If a Wheelspin Wild or an already transformed high pay symbol is activated by another Wheelspin Wild, a +1 multiplier is applied to them. A line of five wilds is worth 20x the bet.

Free Spins

Scatter symbols appear on the three central reels, which trigger 10 free spins when 3 are in view. During free spins, Wheelspin Wilds are sticky when they hit, holding their place on the grid and triggering their feature on each free spin as described above.

Super Free Spins

Super free spins are awarded when Nitro Wilds land on reels 1 and 5 at the same time as 3 scatters on reels 2-4. As before, Wheelspin Wilds are locked in place for the duration of free spins, where they activate their feature on each spin. In super free spins, any high pay symbol converted to a wild gets a +1 multiplier applied to its position. These multipliers get used when a wild symbol lands or a wild conversion occurs in the respective position. Multipliers do not reset between super free spins, meaning they are persistent to the end of the round and are capped at x5. When more than one is used in a win, the values are multiplied together first.

Buy Feature

Eligible players get two choices when it comes to buying features. One is a regular round of free spins for 100x the bet; the other is super free spins for 400x the bet.

Hot Rod Racers: Slot Verdict

If you're not super into cars, then it might take a bit longer to fall for Hot Rod Racer's particular set of charms. If we are being brutally honest, Hot Rod Racers looks decent enough, but there is also something about its appearance that came across as a teensy bit cheap. Like the owner of a hot rod whose budget fell short in the middle of an upgrade and, instead of using actual chromed metal, settled on silver-coated plastic. However, they've driven the car around, and the silver top coat is chipping away to reveal a yellow plastic substance beneath. Hot Rod Racers doesn't reach that level of exaggeration, however, and the visuals certainly aren't a showstopper once the game's hidden talents come roaring to the fore.

The highlight around here, the flames on the side of the car or fluffy dice hanging in the mirror, if you will, is when the Wheelspin Wild feature starts stacking multipliers. What it does is kind of like Road Rage, with the zooming symbols, yet here it's simpler, though still hugely effective when it's firing. The first time Hot Rod Racer put the pedal to the metal was after buying super free spins, and a 7,000x result was achieved off a single free spin, seemingly out of nowhere. Okay, not out of nowhere, because the previous free spins had built a few decent position multipliers, but it was like the game had flipped the nitrous oxide switch on. It was similar in many ways to the sticky wild multiplier effect found in Top Dawg$. Like Top Dawg$, Hot Rod Racers also comes with a win cap of 25,000x the bet, and after what we saw during testing, there is no doubt the game has a ton of firepower to possibly threaten that figure.

Super free spins might be where the game was at its most exciting, yet there are thrills to be had during the base game and non-super free spins as well. Regular action is broken up by the Wheelspin Wild feature, which might not do 0-60 in 2.8 seconds every time, but it keeps the pace flowing. As such, even players who don't have a love affair with fast cars but do appreciate the power of multiplying multipliers should be able to find plenty in Hot Rod Racers to potentially blow their hair back.