| Online Slot Machine | Hot Ink |
| Slot Provider | Microgaming Casino Software |
| Jackpot Slot | No |
| Reels | 5 |
| Win Lines | 1024 |
| RTP | 97.5% |
Hot Ink is one of the Microgaming slot machines, and it is offered on their Quickfire platform. It’s a title which seems to be heavily inspired by the world of body art and by tattoos. Pretty much all their symbols are tattoos or people that are wearing them, mixing images of all kinds together, and yet still making it work. That’s not the only thing that you will love about this slot machine, another one being the presence of 1024 ways to win on just five reels. Respin buttons, bonus games, free spins, multipliers, scatters and wilds are all on the list of features in Hot Ink. The prizes you can get inside will go up to $25,000.
Theme & Design
The world of tattoos can have incredible variety, and Hot Ink gives you a sample of what you can expect if you want to get one yourself. From cherry shaped 8 balls, to flaming dice, hearts with wings and horns, or simple lucky horseshoes, the examples of tattoos which are used as examples in Hot Ink can be a lot of fun, but also unusual. The quality is high wherever you look in this game, with the symbols and the background graphics both offering the same type of experience and unusual mix of characters and objects.
The symbols with bigger payouts sport images with tattoo artists, beautiful women, tattoo parlors and chairs, while the ones which pay less are going to be with examples of tattoos on them.
A rock music inspired soundtrack can be heard in the background while you play this game, kind of muted normally, but taking off for the few seconds during which the reels are spinning.
Betting Options & Prizes
A slot with ways to win doesn’t ask you to use one coin in each case, like it would happen with paylines. Instead, it uses a fixed number of coins to activate all the ways to win, 50 in this case. You use 50 to 500 coins, and the game considers that you’ve used 1 to 10 coins for each way to win/virtual payline. The denomination for the coins varies between $0.01 and $0.25, which means that the maximum bet here is worth $125.
Regular combinations of symbols will pay up to 1,000x the line bet, or up to 10,000 coins in this case. With denominations at $0.25, the value of the prize is only $2,500. It can be improved further, with help from the free spins multipliers. The better payouts seem to come from scatter symbols which pay up to 100 times the bet value, meaning $12,500 in the base game and $25,000 during free spins (2x multiplier applied).
Features Explained
In slots with ways to win, you create your combinations by landing the matching symbols on consecutive reels, going from the left to the right in most cases. It’s easier to get paid, and you have 1024 ways to win in titles with four symbols per reel (like this one), or 243 ways on those with three symbols.
One feature that you don’t see too often is the Respin button. Placed underneath each reel, it allows you to respin just that one reel in exchange for a price. You can use it to try and complete your combo. For example, you land three matching symbols on the first three reels, and another one on the fifth reel. To create a combo of five symbols, you need another matching symbol or a wild somewhere on the fourth reel. You click on the Respin button of the fourth reel, while paying for the privilege, and it will spin again, hopefully bringing you the symbol you need and triggering a big payout.
There are other features and symbols in this game which are a lot more common. The wild symbol is one of them, a symbol that acts as a substitute or forms its own combinations. There is nothing unusual about it.
One way to get free spins in this game is through the scatter symbol with the Chinese Fish on it. If you land three to five such symbols, on random reels, it will bring you 20 free spins and 2x multipliers. You also win payouts of up to 100 times the bet value.
The Tattoo Bonus Logo is the other scatter symbol, and in its case you can get access to a bonus game if you have at least three present. You have to click on the various albums with tattoo examples, and depending on what you find inside you can get prizes and maybe even 10 free spins with 2x multipliers.
What Makes It Special
One of the main things that would make me want to give this game a try is the Respin feature, mostly because it gives you something extra to do besides just clicking on a Spin button. You have a decision to make here, whether it’s worth paying the price to respin a particular reel, plus you have to pay attention and actually notice where this could bring you a new win.
Another thing particularly special about this game is that it unofficially has the highest rtp (97.5%) of all Microgaming slots! In fact, if your playing with a bonus and the WR is x30 your bonus amount, then playing this slot with even small wagers, has an expected rtp of 100.8%. Most other +EV bonus/slot strategies demand that you shoot for the moon (ie. high risk and large $$ / spin wagers), but this slot, the rtp is high enough that you can be expected to make a profit, even without resorting to high risk/variance play strategies!
