Always Up! x10000 Slot Review

Always Up! x10000 is BGaming's sequel to its Chinese New Year fireworks slot, released on 4 February 2026, and it is an unusual hybrid: a compact classic-style reel game bolted to a crash-style bonus round. The headline numbers are an RTP of 96.05%, very-high volatility, a hit rate of 11.55%, a maximum multiplier of x10,490 and a top payout of €251,760. The demo above is the same certified build the casinos run, with credits instead of cash, which makes it the sensible place to work out whether the rhythm of the game suits you before any money is involved. Play is for adults aged 18 or over.

The sequel moves to a 5×3 grid, up from the smaller layout of the original. There is a discrepancy worth flagging in the published material: the game data lists 10 paylines, while BGaming's own release copy refers to five winning lines. The studio has not reconciled the two, so treat the line count as the one displayed in the paytable of whichever build your casino serves, and check it before you size a bet. Either way, this is a fixed-line classic frame rather than a cluster or ways engine, and the base game is deliberately thin: symbol wins are the connective tissue between bonus triggers rather than the main event.

The main event is the bonus. Land 3, 4 or 5 Scatters in a single spin and you are taken to a screen with five firework rockets. You pick one, press start, and the rockets each reveal a random multiplier that then climbs as the fireworks compete. The round ends when every rocket has exploded, and your chosen rocket's final figure is what you collect. BGaming has reworked the flight physics and anticipation animations for the sequel, which matters more than it sounds: in a crash-style round, the pacing of the climb is the entire experience, because the outcome is already determined by the RNG the moment you commit.

Scatters and tiered ceilings

The number of Scatters does not just trigger the bonus, it sets the ceiling for that round. Three Scatters cap the round at x999, four at x2,997 and five at x9,990. This is a tiered structure rather than a scaling one, and the practical consequence is blunt: the overwhelming majority of bonus rounds you enter organically will be three-Scatter triggers, and those rounds simply cannot produce the number on the game's title card. The five-Scatter tier is the only organic route to the near-cap outcomes, and BGaming does not publish how often each tier lands.

Four Buy Bonus options

You can purchase entry directly, with four price points shown in the buy pop-up, including a Mystery Buy that assigns a random maximum multiplier. Buying converts a slow, variable grind into an immediate, high-cost sequence of discrete outcomes, which raises effective volatility per unit of time even if the underlying return is broadly comparable. BGaming does not publish separate RTP figures for the individual buy tiers or the Mystery option, so you cannot verify whether the Mystery route is priced better or worse than the fixed tiers. Assume it is priced fairly rather than favourably.

The gap between x9,990 and x10,490

Note that the advertised cap of x10,490 sits 500x above the best bonus tier. That difference has to come from base-game line wins landing alongside a maximum bonus, which tells you the true top outcome requires two good things at once, not one.

This suits players who enjoy crash mechanics and want a slot wrapper around them, and those who find genuine very-high volatility slots too silent to sit with. The pick-a-rocket round gives you something to do rather than watching autospin, and the tiered Scatter ceilings give the base game a clear objective. Buy-feature players get four entry points, which is more granularity than most BGaming titles offer.

Skip it if you optimise for RTP — there are better-priced games in the same catalogue, several of them with comparable ceilings. Skip it too if you dislike outcomes being decided in a separate mini-game, because the base reels here are a delivery mechanism rather than a destination, and the small frequent wins will not sustain a session on their own. Anyone drawn in purely by the x10000 in the title should read the Scatter tiers again before playing, since most triggers cap at x999. If you do decide to try it, check the paytable on the specific build at whichever of the casinos carrying BGaming titles you use, given the line-count discrepancy in the published material.

Always Up! x10000 is a well-judged piece of design with a house-favourable price tag. The crash bonus is a genuine point of difference, the tiered Scatter ceilings create meaningful anticipation, and an 11.55% hit rate makes a very-high volatility game unusually tolerable to sit through. But 96.05% is near the floor of what BGaming publishes, the advertised cap is gated behind the rarest trigger tier, and no buy-option RTPs are disclosed. It earns a cautious recommendation for players who want the mechanic specifically, and a pass for anyone shopping on maths alone.