Day 45 - Raid Bound - Slot Review

On day 45, I took on Raid Bound by Meta Gaming, a 5x3 slot with 10 paylines, 96.7% RTP and a max win of 100,000x, released this year.

The theme is a fantasy dungeon raid, like an RPG. Your party is made of five classes: the Warrior, the Mage, the Rogue, the Ranger and the Priest, and they’re also the high paying symbols. The low ones are a sword, a shield, a potion, a scroll and a bag of coins. Wins are 3, 4 or 5 matching symbols along a payline, starting from the leftmost reel, and only the highest win on each line is paid. The Wild substitutes for every paying symbol on reels 2 to 5. It never lands on reel 1, so every win starts with a real symbol.

The action starts when you trigger The Raid. There are two ways in:

3, 4 or 5 Raid Scatters (at most one per reel) start The Raid with your party at 60%, 80% or 100% health. A single Portal symbol anywhere on the reels starts the Portal Fight against the Dungeon Boss, with your party at 30% health. Kill the boss and you get gold, the Warrior and 3 Scatters that start The Raid right away, with your party lifted to 60% health. If your party’s health runs out first, the fight is over, and the line wins you got are the result.

The Raid has no spin count. It runs on your party’s health instead, and you fight five bosses in a fixed order: the Warlord, the Archmage, the Shadow Beast, the Raid King and the World Eater. Every class with a winning line attacks the boss once per spin, and a longer line hits harder. After every spin the boss survives, it strikes back and takes away part of your party’s health, and the later bosses hit much harder. The Raid ends when your party’s health reaches 0%. Every boss you kill opens a chest with gold, which gets bigger with every boss, and it can also unlock a new class for your party, heal you or drop Sticky Wilds. Killing the last boss, the World Eater, pays the maximum win and ends the round.

Each class has its own ability, and once it’s unlocked, any winning line of that class fires it, even a line of 3:

Warrior (Sunder Armor): the boss takes extra damage from every hit, and the longer the line, the more stacks it gets. The Warrior is unlocked from the start of The Raid. Ranger (Volley): an arrow flies through a random row or reel, and every symbol it passes on reels 2 to 5 turns Wild. Mage (Arcane Surge): a 2x2 zone at a random position gets multiplier tags of 2x, 3x or 5x. The tags stay on their cells for the rest of The Raid, and a later Surge adds onto them. Rogue (Rupture): the boss bleeds a part of its health on every spin, and a longer line makes it bleed more. Priest (Heal): heals your party, and a longer line heals more, up to 100% for 5 of a kind.

The multiplier tags belong to the cell and not the symbol. A winning line’s multiplier is the sum of the tags on the cells of its winning run, so a 4 of a kind through cells tagged 3x and 5x pays its line value x8. Health Potions that land also heal your party by 20%.

Plan for winning: you want to keep your party’s health up with the Priest and the potions, unlock as many classes as you can, and get the Ranger’s Wilds and the Mage’s tags to build up, so you can fight your way through all five bosses.

My session was a loss. I triggered The Raid with 3 Scatters 6 times, and one more Raid through the Portal Fight. The biggest win of the day was 77x in the bonus round. I couldn’t trigger the Raid with 4 or 5 Scatters, so I only saw the 3 Scatter version.

The base game is very unique, with lots of action on the base spins, and that’s a big part of the fun here. The most fun features of the game most likely won’t drop in a 1,000 spin session, so if you’re not patient enough, the bonus buy is another way to enjoy this great game. Keep in mind that it’s a volatile game, so the chance of a bad outcome is there too. This mechanics was tried by a few studios years ago and didn’t work out, but this game’s execution, mechanics and artwork are on point. Would I play it again? Absolutely yes. 1000 Spins APPROVED!