Do you dare take a trip to the 13th floor in Reel Kingdom’s bravely designed slot Cash Elevator? Brave because they have come up with a rather unusual theme to colour the action. The main features aren’t quite so daring, where you’ll find a Hold-&-Spin game plus a round of free spins. However, Cash Elevator uses a unique ascending/descending reels concept, which removes more symbols from the reels the higher up you travel. Make it to the top, where features trigger and big wins are possible.
If you’ve seen Book of Gems Megaways, you might have noticed developer Skywind slipped in a Tom Hardy lookalike as the main character. In Cash Elevator, Reel Kingdom has done the same thing with a leggy lead female, who looks like a Steampunk cosplay Angelina Jolie. Coincidence or wishful thinking - you be the judge. She is joined by a razor-sharp cheek-boned bellboy, who slips into zombie mode during one of the features. This reinforces the game’s dead lover theme, though mindless zombies with skin peeling off diseased flesh aren’t quite as sexy as pale, broody vampires, so we’re not sure if this trend will catch on.
Powered by Pragmatic Play, gameplay occurs on a 5-reel, 3-row game grid providing 20 fixed paylines to hit wins across. This occurs when three to five matching symbols land adjacently, starting from the first feel. For this elevator ride, any device is suitable, where bets from 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin may be set in place. This isn’t one of those smooth modern elevator rides, but rather a rickety iron-barred contraption you occasionally come across abroad in quaint old Pensions or guesthouses. That was a bit of a long-winded way of saying Cash Elevator has a highly volatile math model, generating a default theoretical return value of 96.64%.
Elaborately designed royal symbols are used as the low pay 9-A tiles, while high pays are trunks, automobiles, keys, rotary phones, pocket watches, cats in the moonlight, and logs. These latter picture symbols are worth payouts of 5 to 50 times the stake when they land in lines of five of a kind. There are two wild symbols, but they are only really used in free spins, let’s take a look.
First thing to cover is the Cash Elevator feature which is always active during the base game. How it works is the game represents an elevator in a building with 13 floors plus a basement level. The game starts on the 1st floor with all pay symbols from the paytable present on the reels. From the 2nd floor onwards, the lowest value symbol is removed from the reels. For example, on the 12th floor, the lowest value symbol is the cat tile.
There are two ways of shifting through floors. The first one is when a winning combination is awarded for the lowest symbol from that floor - then the game moves up one level. Also, arrow symbols may land on reel 3. When they do, the game moves up or down depending on which way it is pointing, by 1-3 floors. Needless to say, changing bet levels locks any previous progress while starting at level 1. If the lift reaches the basement, it is moved to a random floor from 1 to 12.
Next is Dead Lovers Free spins, triggered when a full 1x3 wild symbol hits on reels 2 or 4. Before the round starts, players pick from 3 options to win 6 to 12 free spins. If two wilds trigger the feature, this is bumped up to 12 to 24 free spins.
When the round starts, the game moves to a random floor from 1 to 12. Full reel wilds sit on the outer reels to begin, then move to other positions depending on what is hit during the round. If they meet in the middle, the bellboy changes into his zombie form, and +5 more spins are awarded.
When the game reaches the 13th floor, the Hold-and-Spin feature is awarded. On a new board, only special symbols or blanks may appear. New symbols reset spins back to 4, and the game ends when they run out, or the grid is full. Symbols could be money tiles carrying a cash value, multipliers that apply to the total round win by up to 10x, or other money symbols with a value dependent on what floor you’re on. When the round ends, you move to a random floor from 1 to 12.
For a Reel Kingdom game, Cash Elevator is quite original. We are used to seeing old school fruit, 'book' games, Irish, or Fishin’ Frenzy rip-offs, making Cash Elevator a bit surprising. You don’t come across many zombie romances, especially one who moonlights as a bellhop, making the game all a bit Love in an Elevator, with the undead, and Angelina Jolie.
It’s a shame the execution isn’t quite up to par with the blue sky thinking. There is a bit of ‘oh that’s good enough’ mentality present in Cash Elevator, letting the side down. It’s little things like the jerky two-movement animation or the way birds are locked in place and stand on nothing when the action moves downstairs to the basement. Of course, these are minor details, and no studio is perfect, but they add up to detract from the experience. As do the disjointed visuals as a whole, which switch between photorealism, or short video clips of dashing down hallways, while the rest is standard hand-drawn graphics. It’s like watching a movie that’s half acted, half animated like Hop or Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
One aspect of Cash Elevator which might pull it back on the radar, perhaps, is its max win figure. A figure of 5,100x the bet was almost as surprising as the theme it underlies. How realistic it is, who can say? The Hold-and-Win feature doesn’t feel especially geared towards massive wins, so you’ll need plenty of romantic retriggers during free spins to get anywhere close to that figure.
It’s nice to see Reel Kingdom push the boat out and try something new, thematically at least. Cash Elevator might have hit harder if they’d ironed out a few wrinkles in the rest of the game, but it feels like progress of sorts.
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