Rarr! Look out, players; monsters are on the loose. Actually, not to worry, monsters often appear in online slots in a more charming form, and Monster Superlanche from developer Pragmatic Play keeps the tradition going strong. Not sure who started this trend, but for some reason, monster-y, alien-y type critters in slots often come with a blobby, big-eyed look about them. Reactoonz was an early addition to the genre, followed by slots like Gigantoonz , Space Miners, or, more recently, Blobsters Clusterbuster are just some examples that instantly bubbled up from the back of the mind. Is it done this way to distract from ruthlessly merciless math models that have been designed to crush the unwary? Perhaps a Monster Superlanche playthrough will help answer this question.
Instead of flying in from out of space, the critters in Monster Superlanche apparently reside beneath the earth's surface, in a dark subterranean space that switches from calm purples and blues in the base game to reddy hues of magma pools and blasts of flame in free spins. This is no Hades-like underworld, though, is it? The impression we got was that Pragmatic Play has simply chosen to locate the action under rather than over the ground.
>Taking up the bulk of the room is Monster Superlanche's gaming panel, made up of 6 reels and 5 rows, utilizing a scatter pays system. There were few surprises over the math model characteristics, which is more often than not a positive thing in a Pragmatic Play slot. For one, the maximum RTP is stable at 96.03%, while volatility is high for those who like it so, and the win cap is the familiar 5,000x that is practically a Pragmatic Play default. Before taking on the monsters, players choose an appropriate stake from 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin and choose whether or not to turn on the Ante Bet if it is available. Switching it on ups the stake by a quarter, adding more scatters to the reels, thus increasing the chance of organically triggering free spins. For the record, using the Ante Bet drops the return to 95.98%.
When it comes to pay mechanics, Monster Superlanche rewards players when at least eight matching symbols land in view anywhere on the board. Pay symbols are made up of a Teal Blue-Eyed Monster, Blue Star Monster, Purple Monster, Pink One-Eyed Monster, and a Googly Eye Orange Monster as the lower values; then the higher values are a Yellow Monster, Green Monster, Red Monster, and Orange Monster. Hit an 8-9 sized cluster to collect 0.2x to 1.5x the bet, whereas 10x to 150x the bet is paid out for 20-30 symbol sized clusters. Monster Superlanche does not have wilds.
>Monster Superlanche uses a tumble-like feature whenever winning scatters hit, but it's a little different than usual. How it functions is that when winning scatters are in view, all other symbols vanish off the board, and the winning scatters fall to the bottom of the grid. Empty positions are refilled with symbols dropping in from above. If more symbols of the same winning type hit or scatter symbols do, they also stay on screen, and the tumbling process repeats. Once no new winning symbols are added to the win, the tumble process ends, and the win evaluation takes place.
On each spin, a random multiplier appears at the top of each reel. When a reel is filled with winning symbols at the end of a tumble, the corresponding multiplier from the reel is applied to the winning combinations, but not scatters, whatever that means. When more than one multiplier is used, their values are added to each other. Multiplier values can be x2-x10, x15, x20, x25, x30, x40, x50, x75, or x100.
Monster Superlanche's main event is its round of free spins. Gaining access and winning 8, 12, or 20 free spins occurs when 4, 5, or 6 scatters land on the reels. During the round, when a multiplier is applied to a win, it is added to a global multiplier, too. Whenever a new multiplier is achieved in free spins, the total multiplier is added to the multiplier of that spin. Should 3, 4, 5, or 6 scatters hit while the round is active, an additional 3, 8, 12, or 20 free spins are added, respectively.
If the option is there, and the Ante Bet is switched to the off position, players can buy the bonus round for 100x the total bet. Bought rounds are triggered by 4, 5, or 6 scatter symbols randomly hitting, and have an RTP of 96.02%.
>Pragmatic Play are experts in the scatter-paying slot category, having helped popularise the form thanks to releases like Sweet Bonanza and its numerous off-shoots. Of late, if it hasn't been sweets, it's been deities, heroes, or gods, in games like Gates of Olympus, so it's nice to see the studio put their creative hats on and pick something unexpected. Swapping out regular tumble wins in favour of the less common version here makes for a welcome change as well. It's not a million miles away from the hold and respin tactic found in games like Serial, but again, a bit different at the same time. Definitely worth a try for those who enjoyed Pragmatic Play's scatter pay slots in the past and are looking for a different take on the format.
What makes the prospect of giving Monster Superlanche a crack more enticing than it might have been are its reel multipliers. Multipliers are a common feature in past Pragmatic Play slots using scatter wins, but these are often injected via multiplier symbols. The reel multiplier concept is quite novel, though no less capable of driving up a winning total, theoretically speaking. Some cynics might point out that Monster Superlanche still basically boils down to scatter wins plus tumbles plus multipliers, so it's all much of a muchness. And while there is a grain of truth in that, but c'mon, look at those cutey pie monsters; this a quirky alternative and is more interesting than a clone.
Despite Pragmatic Play's monstrous production schedule, slinging out slots left, right and centre, the studio shows it's still got the chops to make judicious tweaks to its popular gaming mechanics. Monster Superlanche isn't exactly chocker with ground-breaking effects, but what's here is inventive enough to warrant closer inspection.
Play for real money
