Willys Hot Chillies Slot Review

Where To Play Willys Hot Chillies

Willy’s Hot Chillies is a brand-new video slot from popular Swedish game developer NetEnt,. This games is one of the software provider’s most unique and creative offerings, following the life of a Mexican called Willy; and you’ll be spinning alongside his insatiable taste for chillies – both of the hot and mild varieties.

In this Willy’s Hot Chillies slot review, I’m going to be giving you an in-depth and impartial look at what the slot has to offer. I’ll be covering everything, from an initial “How to Play” section, and, later on, I’m going to show you how I landed two absolutely massive wins while testing the game!

I’ll also be looking at the game’s symbols and volatility, the main bonuses and features and my final conclusions about the slot.

So, let’s get started…

Willy’s Hot Chillies is built around a fairly conventional format, and the slot is designed around a 5-reel, 3-row layout. The game offers 20 paylines, all of which are “fixed”, which essentially means you’re unable to adjust the number of active paylines.

While I find Willy’s Hot Chillies quite strange – and almost confusing at first, to get your head around – I think it’s fair to say that NetEnt has done a really good job with the graphics, and the slot certainly looks the part, offering some stellar animations and cool sound effects that accompany each and every spin.

Willy’s Hot Chillies can be spun from as little as 0.20 credits, and the maximum bet is a whopping 400 credits – far higher than I’m used to seeing on other slots apps, and in the iGaming industry in general.

It’s also a fairly medium variance game, so you can expect pretty frequent hits during the base game – although I should point out that these hits aren’t typically going to be worth a huge amount of money.

How To Play

Like most of NetEnt’s slots, Willy’s Hot Chillies is super simple to play, and you won’t find yourself needing to mess around with a ton of different betting options in order to get started. You simply need to use NetEnt’s easy-to-use and easy-to-navigate “stake selection menu” to scroll through all of the different bet options available to you in order to get started.

Like I’m used to seeing in recent years, Willy’s Hot Chillies uses NetEnt’s latest game interface – a significant improvement on their last user-interface – and not only does this make playing the slot quite a bit easier, but it also means that you can easily and quickly select the different in-game options available to you.

This includes the likes of an autoplay function (allowing you to set 100 spins up to spin out automatically) and the quickspin option, where available, decreasing the length of time between spins and speeding up the base game process quite considerably.

Symbols and Payouts

Instead of using the conventional playing card values, including 10, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace, NetEnt has chosen to vary things up very slightly by using playing card suits; you’ll find Clubs, Hearts, Spades and Diamonds. There are also four higher-paying symbols, all of which are theme specific and these include Tacos, Hot Sauce, a Pinata and a Treasure Chest, filled with gold.

It’s the Treasure Chest you’ll want to keep a lookout for, as landing a 5-of-a-kind combo pays 3X your stake – and if you read that correctly and wondered if it was a misprint; no, 3X is the maximum you can win from a single line bet.

While all of the symbols in Willy’s Hot Chillies pay pretty low (to put it mildly), during the bonus round, many of these lower-paying symbols can actually be multiplied – so don’t worry, there is win-potential to be found – and in the next section of this Willy’s Hot Chillies review, I’m going to show you exactly how to trigger the bonuses and features!

Bonus Features

When it comes to the bonuses and features inside Willy’s Hot Chillies, the game’s all about multiplier wilds and Willy’s Hot Wheel. Below, I’m going to look at both of these bonuses and features in detail.

Multiplier Wilds

The multiplier wilds are what makes the base game in Willy’s Hot Chillies bearable and worth playing – and they appear in the form of a 2X, 3X, 4X or 5X wild.

If two or more of these multiplier wilds appear on a winning bet line, the values of the multipliers are added together; for example, a 2X wild and a 5X wild would multiply the win in question by 10X; unfortunately, they don’t multiply. The multiplier wilds can also appear “stacked” on reels 2, 3, 4 and 5 – a welcomed addition in my eyes.

Willy’s Hot Wheel

When a bonus symbol lands on the first reel at the same time as a reel covered in multiplier wilds, then Willy’s Hot Wheel bonus round is triggered, and any full reels of multiplier wilds in view then turn into Fire Pointers.

You will then be awarded a number of free spins – one spin for each multiplier wild that’s currently on your screen – and the multiplier wilds add even more spins. For example, if you landed the bonus symbol with three stacked wilds, all with a 3X multiplier attached, you’d be awarded a total 9 free spins.

You are then taken to Willy’s Hot Wheel, which is designed quite uniquely; it’s not a round wheel like we’re used to seeing from video slots, but, instead, a horizontal scroll of symbols that appears above the top of the game. When the wheel lands, the fire pointer that’s currently in view determines the prizes you can receive – and these are shown below:

• Coin Win: awards a payout of between 1X and 30X your stake
• 3 Spins: adds three more spins to your total amount remaining.
• Extra: turns one of the other reels into a fire pointer (doubling your chances of winning).
• Chilli Multiplier: each time this lands, the overall Chilli multiplier increases by +1; at the end of the bonus, this then multiplies your entire bonus win.

I should also point out here that the wheel does also include a number of “blank” spaces. This means it’s pretty common for the Fire Pointer to land on an empty space. Doing so does take up one of your spins, and it happens quite frequently – so don’t get annoyed, it’s just the way the game’s been built!

You get to keep spinning Willy’s Bonus Wheel until you’ve run out of spins, at which point your winnings will be added up, and multiplied by the multiplier you’ve managed to achieve.

This can result in some nice totals. I only actually managed to get Willys Hot Wheels once during my test period, which was the one I showed you above. But it still resulted in a major result.

And as you’re about to see, this wasn’t even the biggest win I had on the game.

Jackpot and How To Win

Unfortunately, one of the major areas where Willy’s Hot Chillies is a bit of a let-down is with the maximum win.

For some reason, NetEnt has chosen to cap the game’s max win at just 2,000X stake – and what bothers me most isn’t that the game has such a low win cap, but more that it’s going to be insanely hard to actually reach anywhere near 2,000X in the vast majority of cases.

That doesn’t mean that very large wins are impossible though.

About half way into my testing for this review, I spun in this 25K Euro Super Mega Win, right off the reels. While it’s not the jackpot or max win on this game, for many people (myself included) this is a pretty life changing sum.

Now I know for some players, only the jackpot is good enough. Achieving the maximum win is going to be impossible during the base game; to hit it, you’ll need to do extraordinarily well during the Willy’s Hot Chillies Bonus Wheel feature, and you’ll need plenty of multipliers and big cash prizes to get anywhere near this!

Software

An area where Willy’s Hot Chillies does shine is when it comes to the game’s mobile gameplay, and that’s thanks to the fantastic mobile-optimized nature of the slot.

Willy’s Hot Chillies uses NetEnt’s “One Touch” mobile gaming technology, and this allows for seamless, state-of-the-art mobile graphics without putting too much stress on your mobile device. I was able to enjoy playing Willy’s Hot Chillies for many hours on my various mobile devices – and not once did I find my device heating up or notice any sufficient battery drain.

While Willy’s Hot Chillies is optimised for portrait mode play, I’d still recommend that you tilt your device into landscape mode where possible as this will significantly improve the experience of your gaming time.

I’ve got to give credit where credit’s due, and Willy’s Hot Chillies renders super well from all mobile devices, and you won’t find yourself running into any issue while playing from your mobile device – just make sure you have a decent internet connection, preferably from a WIFI network!

Summary

While I love the creative elements of Willy’s Hot Chillies – the graphics are great, the sound effect fits perfectly, and even the bonus round is actually pretty fun – I can’t help but feel a bit let-down having played the slot.

The great-looking graphics are somewhat dwarfed by the fact that you know the maximum win is so low – just 2,000X your stake – and I was also surprised with how difficult it was to actually trigger the bonus round. I managed it only once, although to very good effect. But I felt I was quite lucky to be perfectly honest.

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In my opinion, Willy’s Hot Chillies is a great game for the more casual, relaxed player – but those who’re playing video slots with the aim of hitting big wins – and realising some of the once-in-a-lifetime win-potential we’re seeing in many video slots today are likely going to find themselves slightly disappointed with what Willy’s Hot Chillies has to offer.

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Last Updated on February 21, 2021