ABOUT
Keep ‘Em Cool by Hacksaw Gaming welcomes you to the beach to hang out with an adorable piglet. With a unique frozen mechanic and many more surprises, the slot somehow manages to keep things cool and hot at the same time!
Betting Options and Bonus Features
On a sunny beach, a 5x5 grid consists of tropical fruits like apples, oranges, plums, bananas, and dragon fruit. But it’s the cherries that will hold the biggest reward of 800x for a 12+ cluster while the minimum number of symbols required in a cluster to win is 5.
Matching the relaxing and chill vibe, Keep ‘Em Cool has a medium volatility and a hit frequency of 31.12% so players can win more often. In addition, the default RTP is 96.19% while the max win is 5,000x the bet.
A feature that is crucial to the base game experience is the Frozen symbol. Any normal symbol can be in 3 states - unfrozen, half-frozen, or fully frozen. When a winning combination occurs, all unfrozen symbols on screen disappear while fully-frozen or half-frozen symbols remain (even if they don’t contribute to the win). Then, fully-frozen symbols become half-frozen, and half-frozen becomes unfrozen and new symbols drop down. This process continues until no more winning combinations are formed.
You can’t go to the beach without a drink, so Keep ‘Em Cool will randomly throw into the grid Cocktail Glass symbols. What they do is turn all the symbols in a winning cluster (if there is one) into a fully-frozen state. What’s more, the Cocktail Glass has a number displayed on it, indicating how many times the winning symbols will be frozen. The maximum number is 5, so players have the potential to enjoy the same win 5 times in a row.
When the Blender Scatter symbol appears, it activates and selects one type of symbol to absorb. New symbols drop down from above to fill the gaps, continuing until no more symbols of the chosen type are left on the grid. At the end of the spin, the Blender awards a payout based on the number of absorbed symbols, as per the paytable values. The Blender begins with a count of 2 and increases by 1 for each absorbed symbol.
The Sunset Picnic Bonus Game is triggered when 3 Picnic Baskets appear in a single base game spin. Each Picnic Basket reveals a number between 3 to 5, and the total determines the number of free spins awarded. During this round, the chances of landing Cocktail Glasses and Blenders are higher. Landing Picnic Basket symbols during the bonus awards an additional 2 to 5 free spins per basket.
2 bonus buy options are available, the first one being the Bonushunt FeatureSpins, which costs 3x every bet to gain 5 times more likelihood of triggering the bonus. The second option is buying the Sunset Picnic bonus for 100x the bet( note that this option is rated to be highly volatile).
Roshtein’s Take
Keep ‘Em Cool is a relaxing slot that puts a lot of effort into creating a one-of-a-kind experience. The frozen system is such an innovative mechanic that fits the cluster-pay genre perfectly. The Cocktail Glass and Blender symbols are also quite entertaining features. However, one thing Keep ‘Em Cool fails to execute right is the bonus game: it adds no extra features, and while the bonus is still fun, the potential here could have been so much higher.
