Slot Vegas Megaquads

Slot Vegas Megaquads: Overview

Infamous gambling hotspot Sin City is the location for Big Time Gaming's quad powered game Slot Vegas. Quad, since players get to experience the new Megaquads mechanic which runs four reel sets at the same time. The result is a lot of on-screen action, yet it never gets too overwhelming. Like Star Clusters, Slot Vegas keeps a handle on all of those symbols, while producing several eye-watering stats in the process. So, Vegas is where the game is located, well, a gambling town of the past full of old wide-bodied cars parked beneath an equally wide blue sky. Glitzy motels line the boulevard, a far cry from the modern corporate monoliths tourists flock to nowadays.

In more ways than one it feels like a direct continuation of the Donuts slot, or as the CEO himself put it - "as if you stopped at that donut shop just outside Reno to fill up before the final destination". There are still plenty of gaudy flashy lights in the game as well as a happy-go-lucky or, depending on your mood, super annoying soundtrack with a Bonanza-dipped-in-Vegas feel. Amongst others, you get an instrumental of "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain", so prepare for plenty of banjo action while you spin.

Playable on any device from 20 p/c to $/€20 per spin, the eye-catcher here are the four individual reel sets dominating the screen - each one 4x4 in size during the base game whilst merging together during the features. During regular play, each reel set can produce 256 win ways, but with the help of the features the game is capable of expanding this number to a mind-bending 16,777,216 ways to win.

Mathematically, Big Time Gaming remains as reliable as always as they're one of few game studios left still offering their games with fixed RTP. In this particular case, RTP is a healthy 96.59% while volatility is as high as they come. There can be lengthy waits between free spins, yet due to the way the Symbol Multipliers work, this downtime can actually work in your favour.

Taking a look at the paytable reveals 6 low pay royals and 4 high pays. The high pays consist of green, blue and red rhinestone encrusted Lucky Seven symbols topped by a big purple diamond. The four premium symbols are worth 0.3x to 1x the stake for four of a kind. When grids combine, their values increase to a possible 0.7x to 2x the stake for eight of a kind.

Slot Vegas Megaquads provides two types of wilds to help pull together winners. One is the standard wild appearing on reels 2, 3, and 4 to substitute for any symbol except the scatter or the Rainbow Wild. The Rainbow Wild appears on reels 2 and 3 to substitute for anything except the scatter.

Slot Vegas Megaquads: Features

When it comes to features, some elements have popped up in previous games, while some are fresh, providing a nice mix of familiar and new. The features list includes Symbol Multipliers, the Rainbow Wild Bonuses, and free spins.

Central to the game is the Symbol Multiplier system. To the left of the reels you'll find a symbol counter. This counter keeps track of Symbol Multipliers which come into play in both the base and bonus game as well.

Now, whenever you land a 4 of a kind premium symbol, the multiplier for the respective symbol is increased by x1 and does not reset. So for example, if you land 4 purple diamonds, the purple diamond counter increases from x1 to x2 and so on. During the base game, Symbol Multipliers are applied to any corresponding Diamond or Lucky Seven win.

Keep an eye out for the Rainbow Wilds. If they appear on 2 reel sets side by side, then the Rainbow Wild Bonus comes into play. As well as getting a blast of 'Somewhere over the Rainbow', the two reel sets merge into one 8 reel grid before any wins are paid.Not only does this merging of the reel sets expand the paylines to 65,536 win ways, it also adds a regular wild at random to reels 4 and 5 of the expanded slot. Moreover, when Diamond or Lucky seven wins of 5, 6, 7, or 8 of a kind occur on the expanded slot, their corresponding multiplier is increased by 2, 3, 4, or 5 respectively.

As strange as it may sound to some, you don't want to trigger the free spins too soon in this game which is triggered when 4 or more gold VIP token scatters land in view anywhere on the reels. Landing 4 scatters award 6 free spins while 3 extra spins are awarded for each scatter beyond four.

Before the feature starts, all Symbol Multipliers are collected and added together to give you one free spins win multiplier. Once in, the round is played using two giant 4x8 sized reel sets, each providing 4,096 win ways to help you increase the hit rate.

Each four of a kind Diamond or Lucky Seven win increases the win multiplier by +1. Also, if four or more scatters land in the feature, then free spins are retriggered in the same way as mentioned above.

Finally, should Rainbow Wilds land on both slots at the same time, they merge before wins are calculated, creating an 8x8 grid packing a breath-taking 16,777,216 ways to win.

Slot Vegas Megaquads: Verdict

Big Time Gaming has clearly paid close attention to every aspect of Slot Vegas. Each element affects the other, yet it's all rolled up into one seamless package. Unusually, Slot Vegas is a game you don't want to hit the bonus round too early on. Do so, and you miss maximising free spins with a big starting win multiplier. No one wants to get bored in a base game while waiting for the best bets to trigger though. To counteract this, the win rate is high. Few spins go by without a payout, whether that's a four symbol combo adding to the multipliers or not.

Naturally, most of the time, these tokenistic wins are pretty insignificant due to the low symbol values. Yet they do combat the base game blues and keep engagement levels up. As does the multiplier collection system itself. Not exactly brand new as a similar type of collection feature has been used previously in Kingmaker, but the new Rainbow Wild feature, as well as little adrenaline hits from frequent wins, keeps the game ticking along.

As you might expect from an exceedingly volatile game, Slot Vegas Megaquads can be quite capricious. During testing, the bonus game triggered early on, which meant starting free spins with a meek x4 multiplier. Then a lengthy wait for the second trigger saw a tantalising amount of symbol multipliers build up.

The wait does increase anticipation for free spins, but it also kind of locks you in for the long haul too. It is hard to walk away when you have a bunch of juicy symbol multipliers hanging there. When the next bonus game did trigger, several hundred spins later, the round started on an x43 multiplier. The icing on top is that rewards are there for the lucky and the patient to the tune of 45,000 times the stake.

The Megaquads game engine isn't totally ground-breaking. Still, it's easy to like, or at least appreciate what Big Time Gaming has crafted. Will Megaquads be the game changer Megaways is, or Megaclusters is shaping up to be? It seems unlikely, but there certainly are possibilities. For one, you can imagine the damage 16 million+ win ways coupled with a solid win multiplier could do.

Slot Vegas oozes personality too. The flashing golden age of gambling scenery reinforces the old-Vegas vibe, while the subtle sound effects inject a level of character that was kind of missing from Star Clusters. All up, Slot Vegas is another Big Time Gaming banger with a high fun-factor, choice features, a well-oiled math model, backed by massive potential.

Don't Miss...

There is also a "Fully Loaded" version of this game simply titled Slot Vegas Megaquads Fully Loaded. At its core, it's the same game but utilises random multipliers on every spin.