Blazing Clusters

Blazing Clusters felt like the sort of game someone would play as a protest against the relentless march of progress. It's the slot version of an Amish community, ploughing fields with a loyal workhorse, while all around them, rival farms' robots are taking care of the manual duties at 10x the speed. Once past Blazing Clusters' retro loads of flames look the gameplay is pretty basic. Hit spin, hope for a cluster or two, maybe get lucky, and a few wilds fall on the screen. That's about it. Oh wait, there is the increasing win multiplier in free spins which you kind of need because without it the non-modified cluster values are low. Some of the larger premium values aren't so bad (when multiplied), but the rest are pretty pitiful; 2x for 30 cherries? Better hope you can load up the multiplier as soon it becomes a possibility. Even then, when Blazing Clusters is firing on all cylinders, the most you can hope to collect is1,202x the bet, which feels both low and difficult to achieve at the same time. Our enjoyment of Blazing Clusters wasn't helped by the fact that when testing it on a mobile, things got real laggy. It was like playing some insanely CPU intensive video game while a seriously under-gunned PC struggled to keep up. It's weird because there is no way Blazing Clusters should be taxing modern hardware. Maybe the demo was glitchy; maybe it was designed that way for players to have a real retro experience. Who knows? Whatever it was did nothing to improve our overall opinion of the game, which, to be fair, wasn't high even when the game ran smoothly. If playing an older looking slot with basic features and gameplay is the keyboard warrior equivalent of shaking a fist at modernity, then Blazing Clusters could well be the one. If you'd rather just play something more up to date that provides a pulse-quickening level of risk and reward, Blazing Clusters is unlikely to be it.