Sugar Merge Up Slot: BGaming Adds Candy Theme, Merge Mechanics, and Big Win Potential

BGaming's newest title, "Sugar Merge Up", takes advantage of the explosive growth in the online casino space by combining the classic experience of colorful candies with innovative slot mechanics and exciting bonus features.

European gaming industry publication, European Gaming (report), reported that BGaming’s newest title, Sugar Merge Up, utilizes the same mechanics as its prior hit slot “Merge Up 2”, that was so well received by online casino players.

Candy-Themed Slots That Engage Players

In essence, Sugar Merge Up transports players to a whimsical world filled with sweet treats, featuring a cute animated jelly bear mascot. The game uses a cluster-pay grid that measures 6x6. In this format, players win when they group together matching symbols.

As you would expect from candy-themed slots, the grid displays colorful sweets and candies. It’s worth noting that although there have been numerous candy-themed slots in the past few years, BGaming paired the theme with the Merge Up gameplay, suggesting a deliberate effort to pair a recognizable visual theme with a mechanic that is known to work for players.

While many online slot developers focus on developing products that add a new level of interaction or gameplay to their products, it may be more beneficial to develop products that add new levels of interaction or gameplay while utilizing similar mechanics or themes to retain customers.

The Return of The Merge Up Mechanic

The most distinct feature of Sugar Merge Up is BGaming’s Merge Up mechanism. A cascade-type system where all winning symbols merge into each other and form higher paying symbols. Following a cluster win, all remaining symbols fall downwards creating opportunities for additional wins.

The winning symbols transforming into the next best value is what sets the Merge Up mechanism apart. As such, a player will experience a building effect throughout subsequent cascades, thereby creating the opportunity for bigger payouts during a single play session.

Although this type of mechanic initially garnered attention through BGaming’s “Merge Up 2” slot, BGaming sought to enhance upon that concept within Sugar Merge Up by including several new gameplay elements to provide more varied results.

Bubblegum – An Additional Unpredictable Element

An entirely new addition to the Sugar Merge Up slot is the Bubblegum symbol. When activated, the Bubblegum symbol destroys up to eight adjacent symbols from the grid. Before being destroyed, any multipliers that were part of these destroyed symbols become amplified; then after destroying the surrounding symbols, the Bubblegum symbol converts into a scatter symbol.

From a player’s perspective, this adds another layer of unpredictability. Destroying multiple symbols creates additional cascades providing additional multiplier opportunities and/or cluster formations.

Players that are used to playing more conventional slot features will find this mechanic offers a unique blend of clearing out the way for additional wins and triggering a bonus feature.

Free Spins & Buy Bonus Features

Similar to many modern slots, Sugar Merge Up contains a free spins bonus round. Upon landing sufficient scatter symbols, the free spins bonus round is triggered allowing players to earn up to thirty free spins. If scatter symbols are landed during the free spins bonus round, the number of spins available to the player will increase.

Alongside the basic bonus structure included in Sugar Merge Up, BGaming has created various buy bonus/booster features. These features allow players to purchase additional features for their gameplay. Examples of these features include:

• Chance x2 Amplifier - Increases the probability of obtaining bonus rounds
• Random Booster - Adds random multipliers to one spin or all spins up to x128
• Booster x16 - Covers all positions in the grid with x16 multipliers

All of these additional features are priced based on the amount bet per spin, much like many other modern slots.

BGaming Continues to Compete in Online Casino Game Development

Julia Alekseeva stated that BGaming’s goal with Sugar Merge Up was to improve upon the elements that players enjoyed about previous titles while incorporating new mechanics to continue to stimulate players’ interest.

From an overall development perspective, BGaming appears to be following a growing trend in developing online casino games. Many developers today are using extremely engaging and interactive mechanics (cascading systems) and providing buyers with premium bonuses in order to separate themselves from others in a saturated marketplace.