Day 43 - Raygun Riot - Slot Review

On day 43, I took on Raygun Riot by Black Coffee Studios, a 6x4 slot with 50 fixed paylines, 96.50% RTP and a max win of 20,000x, released this year under Engine.io RGS.

The theme is a cartoon alien lab, with UFOs, rockets, DNA jars and a multi-armed alien holding rayguns on the side of the reels. Wins are 3 or more matching symbols on consecutive reels along a payline, starting from the leftmost reel, and only the highest win on each line is paid. The UFO is the top payer, with 10x for 6 on a line, followed by the rocket at 7.5x and the purple alien ball at 5x. The A, K, Q, J and 10 fill out the low end.

The game is all about the Wilds and the rayguns. Every Wild carries a multiplier, and it comes in three colors: yellow Wilds go from x2 to x8, blue Wilds from x10 to x15, and purple Wilds from x20 to x100. A Wild substitutes for every symbol except the Scatter and the rayguns. When there are several Wilds on a winning line, their multipliers add together, so a x3 and a x5 on the same line pay x8. In the base game, yellow Wilds can also land on the reels by themselves.

Rayguns come in yellow, blue and purple. A raygun pays nothing and blocks any line through it, but when it lands it fires a random number of shots into random cells before your wins are counted. A shot into a regular symbol turns it into a Wild in the raygun’s color. A shot into a Wild moves its multiplier up one step (x2, x3, x5, x8, x10, x12, x15, x20, x25, x50, x100), and the Wild changes color to match its new value. Shots never hit Scatters or other rayguns.

The Scatter is the Bonus symbol. 3 Scatters give you 8 free spins in the Bonus, 4 Scatters give you 8 free spins in the Super Bonus and 5 Scatters give you 10 free spins in the Epic Bonus:

Bonus: more rayguns on the reels, and the Wilds clear after each spin. Super Bonus: the Wilds are sticky and keep their place and multiplier for the rest of the bonus. Epic Bonus: the Wilds are sticky, and at least one raygun lands on every spin.

Landing 3 Scatters during a bonus gives you +4 extra spins.

Plan for winning: you want the rayguns to fire lots of shots, so more symbols turn into Wilds and the multipliers climb from yellow to blue and purple, and hope to trigger a Super Bonus, so those multiplier Wilds stay sticky.

My session was a loss. I triggered 3 bonuses in 1,000 spins: 2 regular Bonuses and 1 Super Bonus. One of the regular Bonuses paid 172.9x, and the Super Bonus paid a little over 100x. Bonus hit ratio is ok but nothing crazy here to balance the low paying base game.

The base game was a different story. Only a few small multipliers connected, and the spins with the better multipliers were all dead spins. Would I play the base game again? Not really. I must say the base game is boring, and the bonus hit ratio isn’t extraordinary, as I triggered it only 3 times. It was an average game and an average session. 1000 Spins NOT APPROVED, but I’ll try a few other slots from this studio. They’re in the top 10 wager lists of Engine.io, so they seem to have improved their games, and they’re worth keeping an eye on.