Fire In The Hole 2

Theme and Design

Fire In The Hole 2 takes us back down the mine, with your favourite dynamite-crazed, bearded dwarf. The backdrop is the same lantern-lit mineshaft with barrels discarded to the sides, and a roof held up by a wooden frameset. The best part is the soundtrack, with lots of loud bangs as the reels drop and explosions as xBombs activate.

RTP and Variance

Fire In The Hole 2 has 4 available RTP settings – 96.07%, 94.08%, 92.07% and 87.05%. Which you play at will be your casino operator’s choice. Try to avoid playing at less-than-optimum settings. You can view the RTP at your chosen slot site by hitting the hamburger link to the left of the reels and scrolling through until you see Return To Player. Good options for playing at the maximum RTP are MrQ (Lindar Media) and Barz Casino (White Hat Gaming) both of which I regularly use because they run games at the highest available RTP rates.

Nolimit City describe the volatility rate on Fire in the Hole 2 as ‘Insane’. That puts it up there with Tombstone RIP and San Quentin xWays and Mental, so don’t expect an easy ride. But with a Hold and Win bonus round like Money Train and all kinds of multipliers and coin collects it clearly has the potential to go off in style when in the mood.

Maximum Win

The top payout in Fire In The Hole 2 is 65,000x, putting it up there amongst NLC’s highest max win slots and showing that the Evolution Gaming acquisition has done nothing to dampen the fires despite some fan’s fears. The odds of hitting that win? 1 in 17 million.

Symbols and Paytable

Fire In The Hole 2 plays out on 6 reels with 6 available game rows. However, only 3 are visible on the first spin. With each winning spin, a new row opens up as part of the Collapsing Mine feature. This is a win ways game so you need 3 or more identical symbols to land on adjacent reels from left to right, regardless of their row position, starting on the left most reel. That gives you up to 46,656 win ways in play when all 6 rows are in play.

The game has a hit rate of 25.09% so to offset that insane volatility you will at least see a (small) win once in every 4 spins on average.

Features and Gameplay

Fire in the Hole 2 keeps the best parts from the original game and moves things forward with added features too. Here is how it works.

Collapsing Mine

This sequel uses the same cascading wins format that you find in the first version, cleverly tied into the mining theme and called Collapsing Mine.

Each spin starts with just 3 active rows, but a win will cause a new row to become active, with up to 6 rows available. Before the new row is activated, the win is paid and winning symbols are removed. As the new row becomes active, all symbols fall down one row and new symbols drop in to fill all spaces.

The Collapsing Mine can also be triggered by an xBomb Wild or a Wild Mining feature trigger.

Buried Features

A new feature for the sequel is the Buried one. ‘Dirt’ symbols – which look like lots of rocks piled up – can be concealing Wilds, Splits or Bonus symbols. These symbols can be unlocked if the is dirt symbols is removed OR is part of a split event.

xBomb Wild Multipliers

The xBomb is back!

Once again, it substitutes for all pay symbols to complete win ways and progresses its own multipliers by 1x for the next collapse. xBombs explode when a win occurs ANYWHERE on the reels, removing adjacent symbols EXCEPT when Wild Mining is active.

Wild Mining

Another feature carried through from the original game is Wild Mining. This one is triggered when 3, 4, 5 or 6 identical pay symbols align horizontally OR vertically (the original only triggered for horizontal alignments) but no winning combination is formed.  The triggering symbols in the line are removed and 1, 2, 3 or 4 Wilds are added to the middle of the vacated space. Every other position on the active rows – except Bonus symbols or Wilds – explodes, and another collapse occurs.

xBet

If you want to play Fire In The Hole 2 at enhanced level then you can choose the xBet feature which increases your bet size by 250%. There are TWO benefits to this:

• You are GUARANTEED to get at least one bonus symbol on the last inactive row on each spin.
• Dirt positions are removed so that the bonus symbols they conceal are automatically activated and trigger when they are on an active row.

xSplit

When an xSplit lands it will split all symbols – except bonus symbols including other xSplit symbols -on its row so there are two of each, increasing the win ways in play at that time. The split symbol will turn into normal symbols once they have split their rows.

Lucky Wagon Spins

Once again, the headline act in the game is the Lucky Wagon Spins which is a classic Hold and Win format, the kind we also see in Relax Gaming’s Money Train series. You’ll need to land 3, 4 or 5 bonus symbols on a spin to trigger this feature which plays out on a new reel set with 2, 3 or 4 rows revealed depending on how many bonus symbols triggered the round.

Now, Coin symbols worth multipliers of the bet, or blanks land on the reels. The round starts with 3 spins and if a coin lands on a spin, the counter re-sets to 3.

On each spin, enhancers are revealed on the row running across the top of the reel set. These are activated if a coin lands on the reel below them. The enhancers are as follows:

• Coin Value – will set the value of the coin on the reel beneath
• Multipliers – multiplies the value of all coins on the reel beneath
• Dynamite – the value on the dynamite stick is added to the coin on the reel beneath AND adds more dynamites to the reels – as many as the number it displays. If the dynamite land on dirt it removes the dirt, if it lands on a coin it doubles its value and if it lands on a chest it unlocks it
• Beer – this will re-activate between 0 and 5 coins to make them trigger their enhancers from the top row on the next spin
• Dwarf – this collects all values displayed on the reels onto the coin that triggered it
• Chests – these appear on the bottom row of the reel set and are activated by the dynamites they collect all visible values from the reel set

The round ends when you run out of spins or the reels are full without any active features remaining.