Marlin Catch

Marlin Catch: Slot Overview

Fishing is a highly popular pastime, spilling over from lakes, rivers, and seas to the reels in abundance. Pragmatic Play's hit Big Bass Bonanza is one of many to strike the right note with armchair anglers, and its success must have caught the eye of rival studio Stakelogic. Stakelogic is no stranger to riding the coattails of others, and this time they've come up with a fishing-themed slot that feels very similar to BBB. However, the resulting slot Marlin Catch isn't what you would call a direct port, since there are no money symbols, ergo, no money symbol collection which was a hallmark of Big Bass Bonanza and others like it. Instead, Stakelogic has tinkered with several elements to produce a much gruntier slot all around. Time to cast off?

Marlin Catch either takes players beneath the waves or gives them a birds-eye view of some very clear water, where fish meander and coral sits there doing its thing. Like other similar fishing slots, Marline Catch is big, bright, and friendly-looking, with chunkified symbols all over its reels. Reels happen to be transparent, so players keen on the great outdoors get a better view of the aquatic life bubbling away down there.

As fishing is for anyone with a rod, Marlin Catch is suitable for playing on any device, where stakes of 10 p/c to $/€20 are available. A medium/high volatile game, rated 4 out of 5, the RTP comes in different configurations, as high as 96.5%, though there is no mention of whether the return value changes whether you play in the default mode or when activating one of the four possible bonus buy options.

Played on a 5x3 sized game panel, with 10 fixed paylines, the job is to hit winning combinations of three or more from the lefthand side across them. The first five symbols on the paytable are puffy BBB-style 10-A card royals which pay 1-5x the bet for a line of five. Then there are hooks, rods, coral, and life rings as premiums, paying out 10-200x the bet for five of a kind. Wilds have the same value as the top premium and substitute for any normal paying symbols.

Marlin Catch: Slot Features

Interestingly, Marlin Catch does not feature a money symbol collection, which came as a surprise. What it does have is free spins with sticky multiplier wilds, a collection bar system, a gamble feature, and feature buys.

Gamble Option

Each winning combination may be gambled or the prize money collected. To gamble, picking the correct suit or colour of a face-down card quadruples or doubles the amount, while picking incorrectly forfeits the winnings.

Free Spins

Landing 3, 4, or 5 marlin scatter symbols awards 10, 15, or 20 free spins, respectively. A few new rules come into play here. One is that when wilds land, they stick in position for the next spin. If new wilds land on the new spin, all previous wilds get a +1 multiplier increase – up to a maximum of x7. If no wilds land on the next spin, the previous wild multipliers are reduced by 1, or if they have no multiplier, they are removed from the reels.

A collection symbol and collection bar also appear during free spins. Whenever the fisherman symbol lands, it is collected on the bar, even if it lands behind a sticky wild. Each 3 fishermen symbols collected awards more spins and increases the win multiplier:

• 3 collectors award +10 free spins and an x2 win multiplier
• 6 collectors award +8 free spins and an x3 win multiplier
• 9 collectors award +6 free spins and an x5 win multiplier
• 12 collectors award +4 free spins and an x10 win multiplier

Buy Feature

If you are able to, Marlin Catch offers four ways to buy the bonus round. Shelling out 100x, 500x, or 1,000x the bet gets you 10, 15, or 20 free spins. Or you can try your luck by paying 375x the bet for a lucky dip option.

Marlin Catch: Slot Verdict

After the positive reception Big Bass Bonanza and its follow-ups received, there are no surprises to see copycats creeping out of the woodwork. The fact that it comes from Stakelogic, who has no qualms borrowing other people's ideas, just adds an extra layer of inevitability. Well, no ethical qualms perhaps, but Avatar UX's legal challenge over their PopWins mechanic saw Stakelogic paint themselves into a corner where the only way out was to licence it.

It feels unlikely the same thing will happen over Marlin Catch between Stakelogic and Pragmatic Play. Partly because Big Bass Bonanza itself was strongly influenced by outside sources. Perhaps Stakelogic has learnt their lesson because the similarities between this and BBB are more tenuous. For one, the money symbol collection has been axed and replaced by a sticky wild multiplier feature which can actually, really go off. Clever the way existing wild multiplier values increase when new wilds hit or are reduced when none do.

Having the chance to buy free spins right away is sure to appeal to certain impatient anglers out there, too. It's as if Stakelogic took the bits they liked, gutted the bits they didn't, and went wild with what was leftover. One of the biggest differentiators is the vast difference in the two game's potential. Where BBB topped out at 2,100x, Marlin Catch heads for much deeper waters where players can technically haul in catches worth up to 25,000x the bet.

Marlin Catch does things differently enough to sit side by side the slot it resembles rather than just push it completely out of the limelight. There is a place for both slots, in other words. The things that Stakelogic have added, moulded, or changed have made Marlin Catch a more original experience than first suspected. There's the same getting out on the water spirit as before. Just this time, players can buy their way to the bonus, gamble wins if they want, and snag sticky wild multipliers in free spins, meaning much bigger fish on the menu.