Get ready for some beer mug, four-leaf clovered, green top-hatted shenanigans in 5 Frozen Charms Megaways, a leprechaun slot from software provider Pragmatic Play. The studio might have stronger historical ties to other parts of the world than it does to the Emerald Isle if its track record of slots is anything to go by, but just because someone has a favourite destination doesn't mean they have to go there every time they travel. As one quote floating around the internet puts it, 'Take vacations, go as many places as you can, you can always make money, you can't always make memories.' Maybe so, but you kind of need money to take a vacation, as well, plus there's always bills, mortgages, rent, and food to pay for…
Sorry, got a bit off-topic there. Now, back to 5 Frozen Charms Megaways, which presents a much snowier side of leprechaun existence than we're used to seeing. Usually, in these games, warm sun shines down on rolling green hills. Here, the landscape is blanketed in snow, lots of snow, creating a distinctly cooler scene. 5 Frozen Charms Megaways is a leprechaun slot where one of the cheerful chaps stands next to the gaming grid, accompanying players as they hunt for the end of the rainbow, metaphorically speaking. This one, hmm, does he look ever so slightly sinister? He's smiling and all, but the way his unblinking eyeballs stare like that, it's hard to tell if he really wants to charm you or enslave you at the bottom of a well, sending food and drink down in a bucket on a string.
>A Megaways gaming engine, under licence from Big Time Gaming, drives the show via a 6-reel grid matrix. Each reel lands anywhere from 2 to 7 symbols on each spin, changing the number of possible ways to win up to a maximum of 117,649. With its highly volatile math model, 5 Frozen Charms Megaways' default RTP figure comes out at 96.5% whether wagering 20 c to $/€100 per game round, with the ante bet on, or when buying free spins. With the ante bet activated, the stake rises by 25%, though symbol values remain the same. The benefit of using the ante bet is that you get double the chance of winning the feature.
The tumble feature removes symbols from winning combinations after they have paid. The remaining symbols drop to the lowest reel position, and new symbols come in from the top. After the tumble, if a new win is created, the feature triggers again. As for symbol values, frost dusted 10 to A card ranks are 5 Frozen Charms Megaways' low pay symbols, and its high pays are a mushroom, a mug of beer, a pipe, a green top hat, and a leprechaun. Winning combinations created by 6 matching royals are worth 1 to 1.25 times the bet, whereas a 6 premium symbol win pays 2.5 to 25 times the bet. Wilds appear on reels 2, 3, 4, and 5, and not only substitute any pay symbols, they may also possess multipliers, as we will see next.
>The bulk of the charms come from the wild multipliers, free spins, and free spins buys.
When at least 1 wild symbol is used in a winning combination, a random multiplier is applied to all winning combinations using wilds during base game spins and tumbles. In the base game the possible multiplier values are x1-x3, x5, x8, x10, x15, x30, or x40.
Hitting 3, 4, 5, or 6 gold pot scatters awards the bonus round plus a win of 3x, 5x, 25x, or 100x the bet, respectively. When the bonus round is triggered, players pick their preferred parameters:
During free spins, whenever a wild is part of a winning combination, it takes a random multiplier from the range selected, which is applied to all winning combos using a wild. Landing 3 or more scatters during the round triggers the same amount of free spins as were initially selected (scatter are not removed during win sequences).
The free spins round may be bought for the cost of 100x the bet. Once bought, players make the same selection they would if the round triggered organically.
>The main issue with 5 Frozen Charms Megaways, aside from basically being a clone of 5 Lions Megaways, is that it just wasn't overly charming. The base game went okay, dropping wilds here and there, not always bringing x2 (or higher) multipliers with them, but doing so often enough to keep things relatively interesting. Shame wilds are popped off the board by the tumble feature, but them's the breaks, no biggie, that's common. Too bad multiplier values don't stack, either. Like single-use sachets of ketchup, they're squirted out once onto fries then discarded, never to be considered again.
Kind of like 5 Frozen Charms Megaways? It wasn't a slot, which was a whole heck of a lot of fun to play. Bonus rounds were, on the whole, icy, frustrating affairs, though most were the 6 spin option, which is likely to be the higher volatile choice. Is it too volatile? For some, it may very well be because it was very difficult to come out on top during bonus buy sessions, to the point of feeling defeated. Of course, luck might just not have been on our side this time; fair enough, that's how it goes. But by the same token, the set multiplier/free spins choices didn't feel like a huge improvement over a regular rising multiplier following cascades set up. Lucky players who bag a big win with an x40 multiplier early in a round will probably beg to differ, though, and at the very least, 5 Frozen Charms Megaways gives gamblers options.
Another wee bother is 5 Frozen Charms Megaways' relatively low 5,000x the bet winning potential. Reach that amount, and the win cap kicks in to shut everything down. Adding to the too-bad feelings was the way the last leprechaun slot from Pragmatic Play, Rainbow Reels, had that uniquely entertaining layers effect to play around with. 5 Frozen Charms Megaways was less intriguing mechanically, though some may like the alternative way it is able to inject multipliers into a Megaways game.
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