You have to kind feel for cyclopes. Outside of the X-Men, they're usually portrayed as aggressive brutes, quick to bash anyone or anything that annoys them with a club. One exception, and this might be a bit obscure, is a benevolent cyclops named Rell from a pretty far out there 80s sci-fi flick called Krull. In Krull's movie world, Rell's ancestors traded one of their eyes with the Beast for the ability to see the future. However, the Beast cheated them by rigging it so they could only see the moment of their own deaths. Back to the matter at hand, and perpetuating the stereotype of the brutal cyclops is Cyclops Smash, an online slot from Pragmatic Play, where smashing is good, as it leads to a rearranging of the grid and, fingers crossed, a decent win.
Cyclops Smash uses cartoon-style graphics as it transports players to a beachside location populated by a seagull, sand, lapping waves, palms, and a lumbering, not very happy-looking cyclops chap with a big spiky cudgel. Best be stepping out of the way when he's swinging it. The good thing is when he does start swinging or stomping, the results range from 'oh, nothing' to 'something good'. Basically, the more he smashes, the better, really. Taking a centre position on the screen is Cyclops Smash's 7x7 gaming grid which creates wins when clusters of at least 5 identical symbols land, connected in horizontal or vertical directions.
>Cyclops Smash is a highly volatile online slot with a rather large win cap in place to smash your way towards, or try to, at least. To get the bashing started, players pick a bet of 20 p/c to $/€240 per paid symbol drop and are able to buy the free spins round rather than wait for the required number of scatters to land of their own accord to trigger the feature. When playing Cyclops Smash, its default RTP comes in at 96.05%, bumping up to 96.06% when buying free spins.
The Tumble mechanic is used to remove all winning symbols from the board when they land and create a cluster. Symbols then tumble down to fill all of the empty spaces, and if this causes a new cluster to line up, the Tumble feature will trigger again until no new wins hit. As for symbols, items of food feature heavily on the paytable, which has, from low to high, a lemon, an orange, a green piece of fruit, grapes, some meat, a gemstone, and a helmet. When these symbols form winning clusters made up of 5 identical symbols, the payout is 0.2 to 1 times the bet, whereas hitting a 15-49 symbol cluster is worth 20 to 1,000 times the bet. Cyclops Smash does not have a wild symbol in its bag of tricks, so hopefully, plenty of smashing will commence in its place.
>As well as the Smash feature and tumbles, Cyclops Smash comes bundled with free spins and a buy bonus.
Whenever there are no more wins, either at the end of a spin or a tumble, the Smash feature may randomly trigger. When it does activate 5, 8, 12, or all symbols randomly, they are rearranged to new positions, moving up or down based on their pay value. Symbols are arranged from the lowest at the top of the reels to the highest at the bottom, depending on the current symbols on the reel they are on. If a win occurs after a Smash, tumbles continue, and a new Smash may randomly happen when no more wins occur.
Hitting 4, 5, 6, or 7 lava scatters triggers 10, 12, 14, or 16 free spins, respectively. In free spins, whenever a Smash happens, and it is followed by a win, the win multiplier increases by +1 and is applied to all subsequent wins until the end of the feature. Landing 4, 5, 6, or 7 scatter symbols awards a further 10, 12, 14, or 16 free spins, respectively.
The free spins round can be instantly accessed from the base game at a cost of 100 times the bet. Once bought, 4, 5, 6, or 7 scatter symbols will land.
>If you like the idea of big heavy objects swinging around and being brought crashing to the ground or the stamping of feet, then Cyclops Smash could be right up your street. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Or not. Either way, Cyclops Smash gets up to some pretty neat stuff with its Smash mechanic while providing a fresh entry in the mythological entity section of the gaming market. As you might expect, Cyclops Smash has the typical Pragmatic Play polish, making it not exactly a must-see as such, but something newly interesting for cluster pays fans to play around with.
The features appeared a little unimpressive on paper at first, but they can do wild things in practice. A prime example happened in one of the first bonus rounds during our test session when a Smash occurred, which shifted a whole bunch of helmet symbols to the lower part of the grid for a circa 800x or so win, or thereabouts, if memory serves. The point is the Smash feature can be extraordinarily useful for helping group symbols together into something that may surprise. And with a win cap of 10,000x the bet in place alongside a rising win multiplier in free spins, it might all end up being pretty, well, smashing.
Except when it's not, then Cyclops Smash comes across as a bit of a one-trick pony. Not a bad trick by any means, complemented by the multiplier and the tumble mechanic, but it's debatable how long Cyclops Smash will stick around in the memory before the next distraction comes along, and given the speed Pragmatic Play is ejecting games at the moment, that won't take long.
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