Always Up! in detail
Always Up! was released on 30 September 2025. The dressing draws on Chinese New Year imagery: lanterns, firecrackers, lotus flowers, golden bowls and red-and-gold purses, against a night sky the bonus eventually fills with fireworks. The grid is tiny for a 2025 game: three reels, three rows, five paylines. Low symbols — blue signs, coloured firecrackers — return one to four times the line bet. Premium symbols top out at sixty times for three matching from the left. There is no notable Wild, no cascade, no base-game multiplier. That bareness is not an accident, it is the plan. BGaming built a crash-game mechanic here and set it inside a slot machine frame. The base game exists only to lead to the bonus, and the numbers say as much: a win every 12.28 spins, a hit rate of 8.14%. That is very low, and hard to reconcile with the "medium-low" volatility label the studio prints on its own sheet. Since our scale has no intermediate step between low and medium, we classify the game as medium volatility while flagging the original wording. The RTP published by BGaming is 96.07%, a decent figure in the upper half of the market. Several databases copy 95.07%: a full point of difference, on a number where the gap between a 5 and a 6 is one keystroke. We keep the supplier's value and flag the divergence. The studio also publishes a second rate, that of the bonus buy: 95.98%. It sits slightly below the base game, which matches usual market practice — and contrasts with other titles from the same studio where buying improves the rate. The bonus triggers on three Scatter symbols, one per reel. The screen then switches to a launch pad where five rockets wait. The player designates one, they all lift off together, and each carries a multiplier that grows as it gains altitude. The rockets burst into fire at randomly determined heights. The multiplier reached by the chosen rocket at the moment it bursts is applied to the stake, and the round ends there. There is no retrigger, no collection, no second round: one cosmetic decision, one draw, one result. That is where the main criticism sits. Nothing distinguishes the five rockets before the draw — no meaningful colour, no potential indicator, no history. The act of choosing gives the player the impression of influencing the outcome when it does nothing of the sort. The mechanic is honest in how it works, but its presentation is not entirely. The bonus buy costs eighty times the stake and starts the round on the following spin. On top of that sits a Mystery Buy option: the maximum reachable multiplier is randomised before launch, which amounts to buying a round whose ceiling you do not know. It is an extra layer of uncertainty grafted onto a game that is already entirely random. That leaves the most interesting figure in the title. The stake runs from 0.10 to 450 per spin. That is a spread of fifteen hundred steps, with no equivalent in the BGaming catalogue where the usual ceiling sits between 25 and 50. That 450 value explains the maximum win the studio advertises: 559 times the stake, applied to 450, gives €251,550. The arithmetic lands to the cent, which is notable at a studio whose sheets almost universally show a flat €250,000 cap unrelated to the game's actual maximum stake. One last detail deserves flagging, because it exposes an internal inconsistency at the studio. At the top of the sheet, BGaming states a maximum multiplier of x559. A few lines further down, in the bonus description, the same document asserts that "the maximum winning amount in the Bonus round is x599 of the bet". Both cannot be true. Arithmetic settles it: 251,550 divided by 450 gives exactly 559, not 599. The x599 mention is therefore the mistaken one, and 559x is what we keep.
