Giving slot players fresh ways to play is bread and butter for online casinos, live casinos and game designers alike. What better way to keep players engaged that with new experiences.
Among the new experiences recently added online are games from Betsoft, ELK Studios and Pragmatic Play. Let's take a peek at what they have to offer.
Tiger's Luck Hold and Win (Betsoft)
Hold-and-respin games are among the most popular around today, regardless of whether you're playing online slots or in live casinos.
Betsoft puts a couple of twists on the format with Tiger's Luck Hold and Win. It has five reels, each four symbols deep, and 100 paylines.
The Asian-style images are set in a bamboo forest with animal symbols including tigers, crocodiles, bears, red pandas, lanterns and gold coins with red ribbons, wild symbols, big gold coins without the ribbon as feature trigger and red collection symbols. The a usual collection of low-payers with 10, J, Q, K and A also are part of the symbol mix.
As with other such games, a bonus is triggered when six gold coins land on the screen. Each coin displays a credit award. Those symbols lock into place for respins. You spin as long as you keep collecting coins and credits until you go three spins in a row without landing another on the reels. Then the round ends and you collect all the credit awards.
One twist: If the red collection symbol appears, it collects all the credits on your gold coins. It deposits those credits on your meter, but the amounts remain on the gold coins and you win them all again at the end of the bonus. The red symbol disappears and your round resumes.
The collection symbol can appear several times in one respin round, giving you the chance at really big wins as you collect all the credits several times over.
Another twist: if you choose, you can buy the hold feature without waiting to trigger it with a reel spin. For 30 times your regular bet, you can buy a bonus, but it takes only one miss to end the round. For 40 times your bet, you get at least two respins, and for 50 times, you get the usual three.
That's pricey at $30, $40 or $50 for someone who usually bets $1. Bonus return can fall short of those bets, but the chance the payoff will far exceed the bet lures jackpot hunters.
The main game has a twist, too. Wild symbols in the base game are sticky. Land wilds on the reels, and they not only help with that spin, they lock in place for the next two.
On average, you'll see a respin bonus about once per 92 spins, and sticky wilds once per 26. It's a high volatility game with a lot of intrigue as you twist through that bamboo forest.
Squeeze (ELK Studios)
On a sandy seaside beach, lies a grid of fruit-like symbols all ready to be squeezed. The grid is six symbols across and seven symbols deep, and though each symbol is a rounded square, they're very like fruit cross sections.
Small-paying symbols are just colors – blue, green, yellow and red. Higher-payers come in the same colors but have pulp lines or sides. A green square with white pulp lines and black seeds looks very like a kiwi cross section.
In that way, Squeeze is similar to cascading reels games where winners disappear and new symbols drop from the top to fill vacant spaces. But here, the squeeze comes from the sides and only the winning spaces are affected. Symbols already in place don't drop down, or move in from the sides.
The squeeze remains on as long as new winning combinations appear. There's a chance at a long winning streak on a single paid spin. A really big win with 17 symbols of the same type can pay up to 250-1, and with bonus features, there's a maximum win of 10,000 times your bet.
There are lots of potential bonuses. To the left of the reel grid are four feature meters. Fill the blue meter to get the swap feature, where symbols swap places to potentially create wins. The yellow meter yields a "make big" feature that supersizes a symbol to either 3x3 or 4x4 to create at least 9- or 16-symbol winners.
The green meter brings the upgrade feature, which upgrades winners to the next higher symbol value. And the red meter brings "spawns wild" to replace six symbols with wilds.
Sometimes you'll see a "bounce back" feature where squeezed symbols return in place, multiplying the win.
And for fans of free spins – and that's just about every slot player – there are a couple of levels. Three scatter symbols trigger five bonus games, and on each the squeeze mechanic applies so you could win several times on each game. If at least one of the scatters is a "super scatter" symbol, you get the super bonus. You still get five free games, but on each game, one of the bonus meters is filled and you get the corresponding feature.
That leaves a lot of ways to win in a fun, attractive setting. Be aware that Squeeze is a high volatility slot. You can win big, but the losses can also come fast. Take your shot, but stick to your bankroll limits.
Running Sushi (Pragmatic Play)
Those who love sushi bars in Japanese restaurants will instantly recognize the situation here. As reels spin, a conveyor underneath brings sushi pieces into view. You get the chance to collect value on the sushi pieces as well as any winners on the reels.
Running Sushi has five reels, each four symbols deep, and is a 1,024 ways to win slot. Instead of traditional paylines, any path across the reels from right to left can form a winning combo.
Reel symbols include sushi pieces, chefs and servers as well as low-paying heart, club, diamond and spade icons. As you spin, the conveyor brings anywhere from four to seven pieces of sushi into view. Above each piece is a multiplier, so a roll with 2x above is worth two times your bet, a 5x roll is worth five times your bet, and so on. Winning those values takes landing three "Take Sushi" symbols depicting female servers. When that happens, you win values of all the sushi on the conveyor.
Three scatter symbols consisting of a sushi chef in white hat launch a round of 10 free spins. An extra in the free spins can bring big wins. A gold-clad chef serves as a "Take All" symbol and he also appears to the left of the reels. Under him to left, values are tallied of all sushi pieces you see on the conveyor for the free spins.
Then if you land three Take All symbols on the reels, you not only win the sushi on the conveyor, but all from earlier in the round that have been tallied on the left. Those are the moments for Running Sushi players to savor.
Free spins are such an important part of the game that you can add an extra 25% to your bet to increase their frequency. On average, you'll launch the freebies once per 298 spins. Bet the extra, turning a $2 bet into $2.50, for example, and you'll get the feature about once per 149 spins.
The extra bet does not increase the payback on any winners, but it does get you the potentially lucrative free-spin round more often. It adds to volatility but not to payback percentage. Whether you bet the extra depends on whether you'd want to risk more and increase frequency of losing sessions in order to increase the possibility of a big win.
