If you've played your fair share of mediaeval-themed online slots or simply have an interest in the Arthurian legends, no doubt you will have heard of Excalibur. If not, it's a legendary sword that, according to the telling, was pulled from solid stone by Arthur or given to him by the mysterious Lady of the Lake. Sometimes it can be hard to remember what happened last week, let alone what took place hundreds of years ago before practically everyone started walking around with a camera in their pocket. Anyhoo, Excalibur Unleashed is the name of today's game which comes from software provider Pragmatic Play and spins the tale by giving it an anthropomorphised animal twist.
The sword of the tale sits to the left side of the screen when Excalibur Unleashed loads, above the bonus buy, in a relaxing glade somewhere in Ye Olde England, presumably. What grabs the eye is a 5-reel game grid set out in a 3-4-4-4-3 pattern. Around it, almost glowing at the edges, are shimmers of golden light, a blurred treeline, and a wee bunny bounding across the grass. The Arthurian/Excalibur tales can be full of high drama, tense action and so on, but Excalibur Unleashed appears to be held on one of the quiet days. Hey, no complaints. We all need some downtime every now and then. Including mighty rulers, even if the main characters in this game are a mouse and an owl.
Along Excalibur Unleashed's vaguely diamond-shaped grid, 20 paylines have been worked in for landing winning combinations across. In Excalibur Unleashed, win lines pay from left to right from the leftmost side as well as right to left from the rightmost side. This is a mechanic that fits perfectly with some of Excalibur Unleashed's main features. A highly volatile slot, Pragmatic Play has rated this aspect of it as 5 out of 5; the game produces a maximum return to player of 96.05%, or 96.02%, when buying free spins. Base bets range from 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin, alternatively, buying the bonus comes at a cost of 85 times the bet.
Tally ho to the symbols where there are 10 regular pays, divided into 5 low pay 10-A royals, and 5 high pays. This latter lot are a bottle, an orb, a crown, a mouse, and an owl. Landing a 5-of-a-kind winning line pays 2 to 3 times the bet for the lower value lot or 5 to 25 times the bet for the rest. Wilds are important. They may land on reels 1 and 5 to replace any regular pay symbol.
Not only that but when a wild lands, it expands to cover all positions on its reel. Moreover, it can get a multiplier of x2-x10, x12, x15, or x20. Multipliers are applied to all winning combinations they are part of. If more than one wild is used in the same win, the multipliers are added together.
When 2 wild symbols land on reels 1 and 5 at the same time, they trigger the free spins round. Players are initially awarded 6 free spins, and the triggering full reel wilds remain in place on reels 1 and 5 for the duration of the feature. If a wild is part of a winning combination, its multiplier value increases by +1 for the rest of the round. When both wilds are part of a winning combination, +1 additional free spin is also awarded.
When buying free spins for 85 times the bet, the triggering wilds may have a random multiplier of x1 to x20.
Whilst there isn't exactly a shortage of Arthur-related slots, Excalibur Unleashed does do one or two things to help distinguish itself. The animal angle is one of them, and it was hard to definitively decide whether it works or just seems out of place. Using a cute little mousey and an enigmatic owl brings a certain spin but lacks the heavy density that using actual knights and wizards might have. No major issue, though. It's nice when a studio steps out of the usual way of doing things to boldly try a new angle, like a brave knight charging into battle.
Okay, that last part was overstating the matter, so onto Excalibur Unleashed's gameplay, where its full reel wild multipliers on either end of the game grid are able to occasionally carve out a decent result. This double wild system works better than it might have done on a regular reel set since Pragmatic Play has bolstered Excalibur Unleashed with a pay-both-ways mechanic. Don't think this means easy wins, though. The review seemed pretty low on hit rate, though that was eyeballing results in speed runs rather than testing the theory against actual stats. And it was volatile AF, too. The first free spins bonus round triggered after like the sixth base game spins going on to produce frighteningly disappointing results. Other results varied, yet it did feel volatile, is what we are trying to say. From meh to a maximum of 5,000x the bet, Excalibur Unleashed can swing all over the place.
To nutshell the Excalibur Unleashed experience, there are nuggets of joy here to potentially uncover. Having full reel multiplier wilds on either end of a pay-both-ways game grid is a solid idea, which has the capability of being thrilling in practice. There's something about Excalibur Unleashed that prevented it from being a great game, though. It's hard to put into words, but the game lacks dunno, x-factor, or is missing an extra feature, or didn't hit hard enough with its theme to be truly memorable.
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