A Hot Hot Blazing Christmas is easy to understand without becoming completely mindless.

The clever part is how much importance Light & Wonder manages to place on one position. Once you've played a few spins, your eye naturally keeps returning to the centre because you know that's where the Fireball needs to appear.

That works particularly well when Cash or Jackpot symbols have already landed. Instead of waiting blindly for something to happen, you can see exactly what you need and what it's potentially worth.

Symbol Rewind improves the experience further. It occasionally gives an unsuccessful spin another opportunity and creates some genuinely satisfying recoveries when the Fireball suddenly appears and collects prizes that looked destined to disappear.

The problem is longevity. There isn't much progression during ordinary play and, once you've become familiar with the Fireball and Rewind, the base game doesn't have another layer waiting to reveal itself.

The 1,000x maximum also feels conservative for a modern slot.

It's enjoyable, accessible and nicely paced, but I'd struggle to call it gripping.

The feature package isn't enormous, but it's unusually tidy.

Almost everything has a reason to interact with the Fireball. Snow Globes give it something to collect, Jackpot symbols make its arrival considerably more valuable, Green Pots use it to trigger Free Spins and Symbol Rewind can help put it into position.

Free Spins then make the sensible decision to keep the Fireball there permanently.

I particularly like that reversal. In the base game you're waiting for the Collector to arrive. In Free Spins you've already got the Collector and you're waiting for worthwhile prizes to land around it. That gives the bonus a noticeably different rhythm without needing to invent another complicated mechanic.

Symbol Rewind is probably the feature that lifts the score above average for me. It gives ordinary spins some additional life and fits naturally with everything else.

I'd still like another layer during Free Spins, perhaps something that upgrades Cash values or develops the locked Fireball as the feature progresses. As it stands, once you're inside, you've essentially seen the game's best setup immediately.

There's something amusingly wrong about a Christmas slot whose main character is a giant ball of fire.

That contrast actually helps it.

The snowy landscape, Christmas tree, presents, bells and hot chocolate provide the expected festive surroundings, while the Fireball gives the game a warmer and much more recognisable focal point. Light & Wonder's presentation is bright and polished without cramming so much decoration around the reels that you lose track of what's happening.

Snow Globes work particularly well as Cash symbols too. They fit the Christmas theme naturally while remaining immediately recognisable as something worth collecting.

Symbol Rewind also provides one of the better visual moments. Seeing the reels move back into a more favourable position gives the feature a physical quality that simply flashing "REWIND" across the screen wouldn't achieve.

It's hardly the most lavish Christmas slot ever produced, but it has enough character to avoid feeling like somebody simply put a Santa hat on an existing game and went home early.

A Hot Hot Blazing Christmas gets more personality from the way its features work together than from any one spectacular idea.

The central Fireball is a good example. Light & Wonder makes you care about one particular position on practically every promising spin. Once several Cash symbols are visible, that middle square suddenly feels like the most important piece of real estate on the screen.

Symbol Rewind adds another nice wrinkle because it can change a result you've already dismissed. It also serves the main mechanic rather than competing with it, potentially bringing the Fireball into play or revealing something worthwhile for it to collect.

The game loses originality points because this is explicitly a Christmas edition of Light & Wonder's existing Hot Hot Blazing Lock concept. There's only so much credit I can give it for wrapping an established formula in tinsel.

But the festive treatment does suit the mechanics surprisingly well, and the combination of snow, Cash filled globes and a blazing central Wild gives it a recognisable identity.

It isn't reinventing Christmas.

It's just setting fire to it.