Five, sometimes ten Quantum Wilds crash onto a dead spin, the grid lights up, and the win tube on the left posts back less than the spin cost. That is Gigantoonz for long stretches, Play’n GO’s third outing with its googly-eyed aliens and the one where they grow too big to stay Reactoonz. The slot now runs on a single meter, the Quantumeter, charging up four stages that end in Gargantoonz itself. Getting that far is the hard part, and the demo is free to play if you want to measure the wait for yourself.
The new arrivals are the mega symbols, one toon scaled up to fill anywhere from a 2×2 block to a 7×7 slab of the grid. Each carries a cluster value printed on its face, a number randomised up to 13, and that value is what a win pays even though the mega only takes one place when it joins a cluster.
Every mega symbol that wins leaves a wild behind when it clears, and one that cannot fit fills the space with its own 1×1 versions instead, none of them carrying a cluster value. It is the piece the older games never had, and the reason a small-looking cluster can pay far more than its size suggests.
Wins do more than pay. Every winning symbol adds a charge to the Quantumeter, the pod off to one side, and a winning mega symbol counts for its whole cluster value at once. The meter holds up to 100 charges over 4 levels, and whenever the cascades stop with a level freshly crossed, the stage in line fires before the round moves on.
Reactoonz 2 ran two of these dials at the same time, a Fluctometer feeding the Quantumeter. Here there is just one to follow, which is a good deal simpler.
Each level triggers its own stage.
Two wilds sit outside the paytable. Quantum Wilds arrive as a consolation for a blank spin, 5 to 10 of them scattering in when a spin pays nothing, swapping places with symbols already there and standing in for anything on the next tumble.
The Gargantoon is the three-eyed giant wild, and only a full Quantumeter brings it out, which is why its stage sits right at the top. Both substitute for every toon, so a screen seeded with them can turn a dead board into a run of clusters, or fizzle out with no win, depending on what comes next.
A win is a cluster of 6 or more matching toonz, joined across or down the 8×8 grid. They pay, then clear, and the toonz above fall into the gaps. Each fresh landing can start another cluster, and one spin can roll on for several cascades before it settles. There are no paylines and no free spins; the base game is all of it, and the Quantumeter is where a small spin turns into a big one.
Stakes run from 0.20 to 100.00. The return is 96.25% by default and as low as 84.25% on some operator settings, and the volatility is high.
The 10 toonz split into 5 larger faces and 5 smaller ones, each paying more the bigger the cluster, from 6 symbols up to 30 or more.
| Cluster | Red | Pink | Green | Orange | Blue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30+ | 1250x | 400x | 200x | 100x | 50x |
| 25+ | 200x | 125x | 75x | 40x | 30x |
| 21+ | 100x | 50x | 25x | 20x | 12.50x |
| 17+ | 50x | 20x | 12.50x | 7.50x | 5x |
| 14+ | 20x | 10x | 5x | 2.50x | 2x |
| 12+ | 20x | 5x | 3x | 2x | 1.50x |
| 10+ | 10x | 3x | 1x | 0.80x | 0.70x |
| 8+ | 5x | 2x | 0.80x | 0.60x | 0.50x |
| 7 | 2x | 1x | 0.50x | 0.50x | 0.30x |
| 6 | 1x | 0.50x | 0.40x | 0.40x | 0.30x |
| Cluster | Cyan | Purple | Red | Green | Yellow |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30+ | 20x | 10x | 10x | 5x | 5x |
| 25+ | 10x | 4x | 4x | 3x | 3x |
| 21+ | 5x | 2x | 2x | 1x | 1x |
| 17+ | 3x | 1x | 1x | 0.80x | 0.80x |
| 14+ | 1.50x | 0.80x | 0.80x | 0.60x | 0.60x |
| 12+ | 1x | 0.60x | 0.60x | 0.50x | 0.50x |
| 10+ | 0.70x | 0.50x | 0.50x | 0.40x | 0.40x |
| 8+ | 0.50x | 0.30x | 0.30x | 0.20x | 0.20x |
| 7 | 0.30x | 0.20x | 0.20x | 0.10x | 0.10x |
| 6 | 0.30x | 0.20x | 0.20x | 0.10x | 0.10x |
Values are multiples of the bet, read at our 1.00 spin.
Gigantoonz lands a 3.5 because the wins that would justify a high-volatility grind sit at the top of the Quantumeter, and the reward waiting there is slim for the effort. A 4,000x ceiling is not much to set against the dry spells a high-volatility game asks you to sit through, and Gargantoonz, the stage that reaches it, stays a long way off for most of a session. Everything short of that is the aliens at their most likeable, popping and grumbling while the meter creeps up, but likeable is doing a lot of work when the stage you are playing toward is capped this low once you reach it. The mega symbols and the trimmed one-meter build are real steps on. What they cannot do is lift the ceiling, or bring the top stage any nearer.
The art carries it. The toonz gurn and mutter in their Minion-ish way against the purple swirl, and when a spin gets going the board is good to watch, wilds crackling and mega symbols bursting apart. All of it is open to try in free play.
The trouble is where the good stuff sits. Getting the meter moving at all takes some doing, and when it does start filling it rarely climbs past the first two stages, so Disintegration and Metamorphosis are the two you actually see, and neither did much for us. Radiation and Gargantoonz, the pair that matters, stayed a long way off across our session. The 4,000x top is the lowest the series has offered, under the 4,570x of the original and the 5,083x of the sequel.
Everything about Gigantoonz is dressed up to get bigger. It opens on a skippable cutscene where a game-show voice watches the toonz multiply over a phone screen until the middle one swells, panics, and cracks the glass, the logo bursting out of the mess. That promise of scale sits in the design, the mega symbols swallowing nearly the whole grid, the giant Gargantoon at the top of the meter, even the name.
Underneath, the machine is the simplest the series has run. The original stacked its Quantum Leap features onto one meter, Reactoonz 2 split the work over two dials, and this one settles on the Quantumeter alone. You track one bar as it fills, with less to read for it. Anyone who bounced off the sequel for its two meters will find this a cleaner sit.
What that climb feels like, most of the time, is slow. Each winning symbol adds one charge toward the 25 you need for the first stage, and only mega symbols count for more, up to 13 apiece. Without them you are counting up one symbol at a time. It took us about 15 minutes of cascades to charge the meter to its first stage, and Disintegration, when it came, wiped every instance of 4 symbols, with the cascade paying 1.50. The best the opening 20 minutes managed was 3.80. Metamorphosis, one stage further on, was no more generous, a lot of movement on the grid for a return that barely showed on the balance.
When it finally arrived, it was worth watching. A late run charged clean through every stage in one go, Radiation seeding the grid with mega symbols and Quantum Wilds, and the meter reaching 100 for Gargantoonz. Three mega Gargantoonz stamped in, split into a shower of 1x1s, and the round closed on 28.10, the best of our session. For one round, the toonz finally lived up to the intro.
Trimmed to one meter, Gigantoonz is the easiest of the three to pick up and follow. It is also the one that keeps its best moment furthest away, and the one that pays the least once you get there. If you liked the earlier games for the slow build toward the big finish, this is more of that, with a lower ceiling at the end of it.
