Dance Party Slot: Overview
More neon escapades have come our way from the prodigious team at Pragmatic Play. With Dance Party, they have shortcutted the creative process by borrowing features from an older slot called Extra Juicy. This time they’ve done away with the fruit and tarted it up with a more modern, yet old-school disco look. Not content with just a face-lift though, the feature in question has also been tweaked to make it extra juicy. Pragmatic often like to tout the high potential their games can pull off and Dance Party is no exception. But, with the way its features work, it might actually be possible to hit with Dance Party. Let’s see how.
First a question. Have you ever been promised the party of the decade, then rocked up in your best threads to find four people milling about a venue that is more Klute Bar than Berghain Panorama with a ‘DJ’ that turns out to be an iPod on shuffle? Dance Party is a little like that. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but for a neon themed slot, it’s not a standout. Neither is the obligatory EDM that sounds like it was banged out last-minute on a DAW. Not to worry, looks aren’t everything, and what Dance Party provides on the sensory front is functional enough.
The UI is classic Pragmatic Play, so to pick stakes, players set a bet level from 1 to 10, and a coin value of 0.01 to 0.50 which gives individual spin vales of 20 p/c to $/€100 each. The potential might be a large number, but everything else is more down to earth, including the setup which uses 5 reels and 3 rows. With 243 win ways in place, wins occur when at least three matching symbols land left to right on consecutive reels on any row. Neon flows over to the paytable where the J-A royals look like glowing fluorescent street lighting, and the premiums BARs, double BARs, Triple 7s, and DJs follow the trend. The one you want is the DJ which awards a payout of 7.5 times the stake when five of a kind line up. Helping increase the win rate is the game’s logo which is wild and appears on reels 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Humming at the bottom of the home screen is Pragmatic’s infamous lightning bolt volatility meter. Keeping with tradition, Dance Party is another high volatility ride from Pragmatic which they have slapped a 5/5 rating on. What this can mean, theoretically and in practice, is a fair share of dead or low return spins, interspersed by bigger wins, ideally during the feature when the multiplier comes to life. Like your trendy mate you can take anywhere, Dance Party comes with an RTP that should please most players on 96.50% although this number can be lower on some casinos.
Dance Party Slot: Features
All the hype is over that x30 multiplier that can crop up during the free spins, so how can we get it? The star guest is that nice, shiny, diamond which is the scatter symbol. It appears in any position, and 5 or more trigger the Progressive Multiplier Free Spins Round. During the bonus game, each spin, whether it hosts a win or not, increases the multiplier up to a maximum of 30x.
The bonus game is conceptually identical to the one in Extra Juicy, but with one significant difference - 5 scatters start the multiplier on x1 and increase it by +1 on each spin, but 6 or 7 scatters start the round on x2 or x3, and increase the multiplier by +2 or +3 respectively. The maximum is still x30, but you can get there a whole lot quicker with the extra scatters on board.
Also, the feature can be extended. Whenever 5 scatters land during the bonus round, 15 more spins are added, up to a maximum of 60 spins in total. One final point is that if the round finishes with less than 10x the stake in winnings, the game will top up to pay out 10x the stake instead.
Dance Party Slot: Verdict
The progressive multiplier might have been lifted straight from Extra Juicy, but Pragmatic has made it more attractive this time around. And it’s not just because there isn’t a single cherry in sight. For one, you get more free spins when they are triggered, and increasing the multiplier by increments of 2 or 3 makes maxing it out so much quicker.
Hand in hand with the feature is the game’s potential. Eyebrows will rise at the 36,450 times the stake advertised on the home page, but how realistic is that figure? It’s not like Pragmatic haven’t offered mega potential in the past that was well out of reach. In the case of Dance Party, mathematically at least, numbers like that seem achievable although time will tell. Taking the 30x multiplier into account leaves plenty of room to make up the rest via high value symbols, so it seems legit from a technical standpoint.
The first time that free spins are retriggered, and that 30x multiplier becomes a certainty, it’s a nice moment. Even with the 30x in play it doesn’t guarantee a big win, but it is fun watching the multiplier increase along with the tension and get closer with every spin. Don’t count on getting a lot of wins during free spins either though. No doubt the algorithm takes the larger than usual multiplier into account when balancing out the return to player.
As to the rest of the game, it feels a little half hearted. Pragmatic Play has gone done the neon route, but could have dived a lot deeper. Dance Party isn’t exactly a game you play to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of a new game world. The executive thinking was probably that the progressive multiplier and high potential would be enough on their own to draw punters to the party. And to be fair, they probably will drag in their fair share.
