I don’t believe there’s a single soul in the world who hasn’t heard of the famous cooking show Hell’s Kitchen with chef Gordon Ramsay . I know that the format has been changed to adapt to the US audience, but the main rules remained more or less the same: a group of chefs (in the UK format) or normal people (for US fans) are divided into two teams and compete to win a job as chef at a restaurant. The competitors have to face all sorts of tasks and challenges in Hell’s Kitchen, under Gordon Ramsay’s supervision, without getting eliminated. In the end, there’s only one winner who gets to have his dream job.
I’ve told you a bit about how the show goes because you’ll find plenty of similarities between the Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen slot from NetEnt and the original TV show. The provider did a really splendid job in turning the rules of the show into slot features.
Put on your apron, sharpen your knives, and get ready to (virtually meet) Gordon Ramsay! Let’s cook some prizes, shall we?
Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen comes with a bunch of features meant to offer you a great time in the chef’s kitchen. The menu holds Wilds landing randomly on the grid, a free spins round disguised as a Team Challenge, and the ultimate Bonus Game dedicated to our dear host, Gordon Ramsay.
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The cooking competition theme in the Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen slot is kept alive by the symbols depicting different types of dishes and the busy soundtrack that seems to have been recorded right in the middle of a kitchen’s action. Both the background and the teams in the free spins bonus round are colour-coded (red and blue), just like in the TV show too. The grid is set on a cooking bank (literally), under the dim light of five lamps, with the iconic trident on both sides of the screen. I know a certain superhero who would be jealous of this giant fork.
Although the design looks seamless, adapting perfectly to mobile phones and tablets, one can’t say the same about the paytable. The fancy-looking signature dishes in Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen pay quite little. The highest paying symbol is the Beef Wellington one, which pays 2.25x, 4x or 10x the stake for 3, 4, or 5 on a payline. Coming up next is the burger with pays of 2x, 3x, or 4x the total bet for 3, 4, or 5 in a winning combination. The cocktail awards 1.5x, 2x, or 3x the bet if you land 3, 4, or 5 on a payline, while the toffee pudding offers slightly smaller prizes of 1.5x, 2x, or 2.5x the bet for at least three in a combination. There are also four royals symbols that can award prizes of up to 1.5x the stake.
The grid in Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen is rather traditional, featuring five reels, three rows, a low volatility, and an RTP of 96.07%. As far as bets go, the online slot offers a huge range, from 0.20 to 400, allowing 39 available bet levels.
The gameplay is quite standard, the symbols paying from the first reel on the left onwards until the last one on the right. However, don’t you think this is a boring slot. No, sir! The symbols to keep an eye on are the Wild and the Scatter. The first has a dedicated feature and replaces all the other symbols, but the Scatter, while the second can start the Team Challenge Free Spins and the Order up feature faster than you can say ‘Dinner is served.
The Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen slot knows how to keep its players engaged during the entire game session thanks to its three bonus rounds. The first feature I want to talk about is Ramsay’s Wilds, which adds more Wilds in the base game and the free spins round. This feature can be triggered randomly, without you having to do anything special. When this happens, between 5 and 7 Wild symbols can appear in random cells, taking other symbols’ positions on the reels. However, the newly added Wilds can’t land in a Wild’s or a Scatter’s place. That’s out of the question.
The second feature is the Team Challenge Free Spins and the Order up feature. Here’s where things really start to heat up. You can activate this round with 3 or 4 Scatters on reels 1, 2, 4, and 5. Depending on how many Scatters triggered the feature, the game awards 10 free spins for 3 Scatters, and 15 for 4.
The entire landscape changes completely during this round. The grid breaks into two smaller 3×5 formats, represented by two teams, the red and the blue ones. Each of the two grids has the same number of paylines as the parent and works following the same rules.
Now that the teams are set, it’s time you chose the one you prefer. Regardless of your pick, the videoslot offers three Order Up features meant to help you increase the balance. So, the Order Up features consist of the x2 Multiplier, x3 Multiplier, and the Team Wilds feature. The first feature multiplies the bet line with x2, while the second applies an x3 multiplier to the bet line. The last Order Up feature places between 3 and 8 Wilds on the reels.
All Order Up features are randomly activated on each spin, having a colour-coded legend. The symbols for each Order Up feature come in two colours, red and blue, triggering specific features on the designated grid. So, if a red X2 symbol hits in the free spins, the multiplier applies only to the bet line in the red area.
Although one can’t say it after watching a few Hell’s Kitchen shows, Gordon Ramsay may in fact be a generous person. Or at least that’s what I think after playing this game. The multipliers that appear on one side of the screen in the same spin are added together. In order words, if you land a red x2 multiplier and a red x3 multiplier, the total multiplier applying to the payline is x5. Sweet!
The winner of the Team Challenge cooking competition is the one with the biggest total win (hurray!). It doesn’t matter if you chose the winning or the losing team, the sum of all wins gathered in the free spins is awarded.
However, the only way to get into Gordon’s Bonus Game is by selecting the winning team. Here’s the place where you’ll see why it’s called Hell’s Kitchen. The background changes once again, removing the reels and adding 15 menus on the screen. There are three types of prizes hidden in the Menus. The random prize of 2x, 3x, or 5x the bet is one type, and the x2 and x3 multipliers are the next two. You get to select three Menus. If you reveal two multipliers, their values are added up and collected along with the total win from the free spins.
The Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen slot gives you a glimpse of what’s like being a contestant (or cook, if you may) in Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen. The slot stays true to its theme, borrowing and implementing all elements to make it seem like a real experience. Still, NetEnt’s slot might not appeal to all players. Fans of the show will surely love it, but the low volatility and the rather small max win of 1,000x might make other players think twice before pressing the Play button.
All in all, from my point of view, Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen is a well-put-together online slot, meticulously developed to meet Gordon’s impossible standards. With three features that open up the rivalry between the two teams or add more Wilds on the screen, this videoslot can provide an excellent experience, if you ignore the small payouts. Also, a piece of advice: don’t play this game on an empty stomach. It’ll make you drool over the symbols.
